Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 259, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 November 1914 — PASSION FOR PUBLIC HEALTH [ARTICLE]

PASSION FOR PUBLIC HEALTH

Idea of Personal Advantage Is by No Means the Main Factor in the Movement. We are coming to care about the death rate, about the average vigor, effective length of the working life, the content of the community life expressed in pleasure, in material well being and in standards of living, not because we are making some sort of elaborate calculation as to how these thjngs will inure to our individual personal benefit, but because there is a satisfaction in the very fact of having been born in a community in*which there is health, in living to contribute to its increase, and dying in the knowledge that later generations will enter into a richer heritage of health than fell to ourselves, says a writer in the Survey. To attempt to translate this passion for the public health into some form of a personal advantage is to miss Its character. The liberty for which socially minded men and women care' most is precisely the liberty to serve to the utmost, with no careful measurement of reward, no certainty of livelihood, no personal immunity even from the very evils which they would exterminate from among men. In this spirit men have,* fought valiantly for. religion. for education, for political liberty, for democracy, for many a great cause which they have instinctively, directly and unqualifiedly identified with the common welfare as they conceived it.