632 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
of these transmissable diseases, which now levy such heavy con- tributions upon social vitality. New York has practically stamped out smallpox, Mississippi can do it by applying vac- cine. Vienna University can hardly find enough typhoid patients to teach medical students the symptoms of the disease. Why has Philadelphia thousands of cases to spare? Pennsylvania will shortly rescue itself from polluted streams and typhoid havoc, as it has shown England how to stamp out tuberculosis among cattle. Consumption among men can be detected and checked more easily than diphtheria, and state sanatoria dare to point to the time when it will be difficult for medical colleges to find bacilli of tuberculosis for analysis. The limits to sanitary prog- ress are not to be sought in sanitary science, but in social theo- ries ; not in the paucity of remedies, but in the unwillingness to justify them theoretically and to pay for their application.
What relation has sanitation to problems of distribution? Does filth disappear or disease recede as a family or a class or a nation increases its monopoly power ? Is the standard of life dependent upon health and the means to protect it ? Yes, per- haps we are about to argue that the study of sanitary problems will help us better to understand monopoly force ; that sanitary conditions offer a criterion of the standard of life ; that the health of a class depends upon its share of monopoly returns from industry ; that man's hold upon life and vitality is inti- mately bound up with theories and methods of distribution ; that sanitary progress depends upon right theories of taxation ; and that the saving of twenty thousand lives a year in Pennsylvania alone waits upon public appreciation of the true nature of mon- opoly and its earnings. It is certain that the thesis on public sanitation must put in the foreground diagrams showing the vari- ous differential and marginal advantages possessed by different factors in production. And this because sanitary science is a phase of social science rather than a branch of chemistry, medi- cine, or biology.
It is of such sanitary science that the historian speaks when he finds the high-water mark of the past century's achievements in the triumphs of sanitary reform. In England, Ireland, and
