language and with such emphasis that the world can understandnot in whispered words, but words which sound like pistol-shots. It is well for them and for us to remember that there are other laws not in the statute books of States, but in the great statute book of nature; laws which are not of our making; laws which were impressed upon material things before we began to legislate for material interests. This idea of law is interwoven with the whole texture of sanitary science. Hygienists are not concerned with chances. We believe that this world in all its interests is interpenetrated with and governed by law. We endeavor to ascertain these laws-laws of life-and apply them to man's health. It is only by obedience to them that he obtains his highest well being; and, by reason of his own best development, contributes most to the common weal. This law is autocratic.

Conscious of the beneficence, we say the common weal demands many things. It demands compulsory vaccination; compulsory drainage, public and private. It demands hygienic architecture; it demands compulsory removal of nuisances, public and private. Absolute liberty is simply antagonism to society-antagonism to civilization. There is no such thing possible as liberty without law. The imperial egotism of I and mine must give place to us and ours. Autocracy in man is not compatible with the general common weal. Savagery may, but civilization does not, recognize the I will of personal liberty; but by the supremacy of legislative enactment, says we will. One is a liberty which runs into license, and developes selfishness. The other is liberty regulated by law, and exercises general beneficence. This, I say, people and legislators must remember and recognize, as sanitarians recognize the existence of laws long antedating any legislation or personal assumption of ours -laws stamped by the Supreme Power upon nature. Men of science tell us to obey these laws and be safe; disobey and suffer. Obedience is better than liberty.

Liberty to inflict disease upon your neighbor should not be recognized in civilized society; it is unwarranted license, and we ask the law to brand it as unlawful. You may not turn loose a mad bull or a glandered horse for fear of a possible damage; but a more deadly enemy to man stalks unchallenged through our densest populations. This the law should forbid.

It is estimated that England has 120,000 cases annually of preventable disease; that is, disease which, under sanitary precautions, would not occur. Suppose that the United States with her fifty millions of people could, by observance of hygienic law, forbid the existence of 120,000 cases of disease; would you regard this as nothing? A rigid enforcement of hygiene will do it.

This is not the unwarranted enthusiasm of a dream. It is legitimate expectancy based upon observed facts in a narrow sphere. Whatever has been accomplished in a single case, may, by the same means, be accomplished on a wider scale. Whatever influence may have redeemed a single district, may, under the same guidance, redeem and set in order adjoining districts. Those who have kept pace with the history of this movement are authorized in saying that its possibilities are almost limitless, and will ultimately wipe out the great mass of morbid agencies, and leave the death rate to

be reckoned only by old age. It is toward this end that American sanitarians are moving-very far this side of it, certainly, but still toward it.

In many lines of life my own State has occupied a proud position in the family of States. Her statesmen, her soldiers, her pulpit orators, her medical men, have stood in the front ranks, and often been leaders in public attention. Shall she, in this greatest health movement of the age, fall from her high place and follow as a tenthrate power in the wake of States which were forests when she was mature and a beacon light? Are not her sons side by side with the sons of other States, willing to work for humanity? Is not the essential value of any true work of infinitely more importance than the renown or the gold which may grow out of it? Is not the consciousness of a life saved, the true glory of man?

But the sanitary movement does not stop when it has drained your grounds and sewered your privy vaults. It proposes to look into the structure of your houses, public and private; claims that architecture is within its province, and demands that your dwellings, your churches, your theaters, your public schools, your hospitals, your court-houses, and your prisons shall be subject to sanitary rules. They are all a part of civilized life, and civilized life is the subject-matter to which sanitation addresses itself.

The sanitary engineering of Col. Waring is shown in his great work at Memphis, placing the stricken city in a condition which precludes the possibility of such disaster as overwhelmed her in '78. So also may sanitary architecture be shown by the skill with which air and sunlight are provided for in your churches, and theaters, and schools, and prisons. The Black Hole of Calcutta is an extreme case, a little on this side of which, in hygienic adaptations, stand some of the structures which are meant for the care of human beings.

These are the closing years of the 19th century. In all the lines of thought the world is full of light. Science and philosophy have placed all material interests at their highest.

Our resources are exhaustless; our possibilities are without limit; and yet, in the very heart of the continent, in the midst of a proud and brave people, the stranger chances upon an imposing structure designed for the accommodation of five hundred people, crowded to suffocation by eight hundred to a thousand; a structure planted upon a dead level-a low level-a level without drainage, without sunlight, without ventilation; unsewered cess-pools reeking with human excreta, standing unwashed between the sick room and the dining hall; sending up by day and by night its pestilential vapors to the well, and fatal effluvia to the sick; stagnant waters, mixed with the garbage from a dense population, adding their quota to an already vitiated atmosphere, which goes in and out, and in again, to the lungs aud blood of men and women already stifled by an air which would poison the sickliest city on the Ganges-with what bewilderment would the stranger contemplate such a fact as this.

Sanitation, I say, must look to architecture; for in the midst of pestilential vapors it is not the criminal alone who suffers. Your luxurious parlors may not have a chair for the forger, the thief, or the manslayer; you may exclude him by your social law; but how

exclude from the cushioned chair at your fireside; how exclude from the elegant tapestry of your bed-room; how exclude from the soft couch of your little ones the pauperized and polluted air which a square like this sends up to the heavens about your chosen homes? Men in authority must listen to the voice of science. If they do not recognize her ordinary tones, this sanitary movement may evoke storm, winds, and thunder tones. Give us pure water; give us pure air; give us sunlight, cries the convict army. Philanthropy and science and common honesty echo the cry, and demand air and water and light as God's gift to man, even though that man be criminal.

Not medical this, you say. Outside of your province, think you? In the name of pain and suffering, and a stricken humanity, what is your province? And what conception have you of the practice of medicine? Is it simply to give sweet powders, and purgatives, and paregoric, emmenagogues, fever drops, and blue mass; and shall the Legislature merely levy taxes and build bridges and count the people? Very much of this unquestionably, but very much other than this also. Looking at it from the stand-point of to-day's science, is it not our province so to place and surround man that powders and drops and medicinal things shall not be necessary; so that all drug forces shall be outside of our province, and that practical medicine shall resolve itself into practical hygiene? Is not this the net purport and upshot of medical science?

The end at which we aim as medical men, in a spirit of true philanthropy, is freedom from disease, and a longer life. The march of science is steadily onward, and in the line of its progress stands this twin idea of health and life prolonged. The dream of the alchemist has faded. He sought for a material drug in the shape of mineral or leaf or flower which should arrest decay and hold the life in perpetual activity. Death has defied the alchemist, closed his laboratory, and gathered him to his fathers.

The fabled spring of perpetual youth, so eagerly sought by Ponce De Leon, still hides its source in the Lotus-land, and there it will hide forever. The only hope left for man for a little longer postponement of that physical destiny we call death is in the development of sanitary science. We have crossed the threshold of its gorgeous temple, and have wandered a little through its inner chambers. We have seen enough to satisfy us that, through the ministry of its earnest priesthood, man will be lifted to a higher plane, walk with a firmer tread, and gaze with a clearer eye up to future possibilities.

Systems of medicine and virtues of drugs will come into being, and flourish and decay, and yet the essential principles of sanitary science will survive in vigor, because those principles are eternal as the mountains.

Mr. H. S. Bennett, of Evansville, announced that he had been instructed by the committee on entertainment to inform the visiting physicians that carriages would be at the St. George Hotel at 8 o'clock, on the following morning, for the purpose of taking a drive around the city.

The COUNCIL then adjourned until 10 o'clock Thursday morning, April 22.

APRIL 22, 10 o'clock a. m.

Present, as before. On the call for reports of committees, Dr. J. D. Plunket, of Tennessee, chairman of the Committee on Quarantine and Inspection Matters on the Lower Mississippi, submitted the following:

Report of a Committee of the Sanitary Council of the Mississippi Valley on certain Topics of the Project of Business submitted for the Action of the Council by the President, R. C. Kedzie, M. D., of Lansing, Michigan.

MR. PRESIDENT:-Your committee, to which was referred sundry subjects for discussion and formulation, and which subjects are hereinafter recited, begs leave to report that it has had the various propositions under consideration, and now offers for the action of the COUNCIL the following resolutions, as embodying the views of the committee:

First. Representatives of the National Board to reside at quarantine station on the Mississippi river. Also, a representative to reside at New Orleans, with the privilege of access to the records of the Louisiana State Board of Health, and to attend its meetings.

Resolved, That the SANITARY COUNCIL OF THE MISSISSIPPI Valley reaffirms the action had at its December, 1880, meeting in New Orleans; demands that the Louisiana State Board of Health invite the appointment and maintenance by the National Board of Health, of inspectors at New Orleans, at Eadsport, and at the Mississippi quarantine station; and announces that in the event of any failure on the part of the said State Board of Health of Louisiana to act in good faith toward said inspectors, then the boards of health represented in this COUNCIL will be compelled to take into their own. hands the protection of the health of their own people.

Second. Arrangement of the work of the inspectors of railroads and steamboats, the inspection at the mouth of the river, and ordering infected vessels to Ship Island.

Resolved, That the inspection service of river and rail transportation by the National Board of Health is hereby indorsed, and its re-establishment for the ensuing season is urged, with the compact on behalf of the representatives of this COUNCIL that the certificates and bills of health issued by said inspection service shall be accepted as prima facie evidence of the sanitary status of vessels and trains presenting the same.

Resolved, That this COUNCIL, being firmly convinced that the safety of New Orleans, as well as of the Valley, lies in the rigid exclusion of infected ships from the Lower Mississippi, strenuously urges upon the State Board of Health of Louisiana the modification of section 6 of its "rules and regulations for the government of quarantine officers and stations," etc., so as to read:

SEC. 6. All vessels from ports in which yellow fever is prevailing, or from ports where other contagious or infectious diseases are reported to exist, shall be inspected at Eadsport, and if any such be found to be infected or to furnish reasonable ground for suspicion of infection, such vessel shall not be allowed to pass Eadsport northwise, except upon presentation of a certificate from the inspec

tor of the National Board of Health at the Ship Island quarantine station, setting forth that the vessel has been subjected to proper treatment and is free from liability of conveying contagion.

Resolved, That, in the judgment of this COUNCIL, the quarantine of vessels and freight should consist of purification of the vessel and its contents, which should then be returned to commerce as speedily as practicable, and that any arbitrary detention beyond the time necessary for such purification is not only unnecessary, but positively increases the danger of propagating and spreading infection. Third. The means of informing the Boards of Health in the Valley of apprehended danger.

Resolved, That this COUNCIL condemns all methods of suppression and secrecy with reference to information of contagious or infectious diseases, and therefore discountenances the use of cypher telegrams; but in the event of danger from such diseases at any point in the Mississippi Valley, it is the duty of the executive officer of any health organization of such place to fully and promptly advise the proper authorities at all threatened points.

In addition to the foregoing, your committee respectfully submits that it is now a well-settled opinion of sanitary authorities that quarantine for yellow fever, especially in latitudes subject to the epidemic prevalence of that disease, should never be located on the main-land. The peculiar manner of extension of that pestilence over contiguous territory renders an insular position of hospitals in which the sick are treated, and of buildings to which infected cargoes are removed, absolutely essential to secure perfect safety to surrounding communities. States and municipalities which have organized their quarantine establishments by removing them from the main-land to uninhabited islands have had the happiest results. It was to secure this great and practicable reform in the management of the Mississippi quarantine that certain propositions were made to the State. Board of Health of Louisiana.

Although in the quarantine system of the Lower Mississippi it is so manifest as to scarcely require argument, yet it is due the COUNCIL that we should briefly discuss the following propositions:

1. The present quarantine establishment is wholly unfit for the reception of yellow-fever patients, for the detention of persons exposed to yellow fever, or for the care of infected cargoes.

A. For the care of yellow-fever patients we hold that the hospital must be located on an island in order to give the greatest security against the spread of yellow fever. It is no sufficient argument to allege that yellow fever has never yet spread from the hospital at the Mississippi quarantine. The proofs of the allegation are by no means convincing, as there are many circumstances vitiating that conclusion. But even if it were true, the movements of the population on the Lower Mississippi are rapidly changing the neighborhood of the quarantine. One of these settlements is within a few hundred yards of the station. A large population of negroes is accumulating on the banks of the Lower Mississippi, whose habits of living render the reception and propagation of yellow fever a matter of the greatest certainty.