Part 3

In regard to one famous resort the State Board of Health of Massachusetts said six years ago: “The unsanitary grounds invite a pestilence. They violate the plainest teachings of hygienic common sense. There is no adequate provision for the removal of refuse, and the wells and privies are everywhere in close proximity, and some of the latter are immense and offensive affairs, emptied only once a year, in the absence of the summer boarders. At a large boarding house the sink drain empties on the ground within three feet of the well, and at another, the well is within a foot of an open trough sink drain, so filled and obstructed that the water sets back, and a filthy puddle surrounds the well.” These were mostly driven wells, reaching water from eight to twenty feet below the surface. The theory was, that the foulest water would be fully filtered by the soil above and around a driven well. The peddlers of this patent, with their boastful advertisements, are in a measure responsible for this mischievous error, which I have met in many states. I found a large hotel beyond the Missouri River, where, instead of even a cess-pool, the kitchen drainage gathered in a surface pool close to the well. At a bakery in another resort the sink drain and cess-pool are but twelve feet from the well. Twenty-four privies and thirteen cess-pools are within a radius of 140 feet of a well used by many families. When the water from forty wells was analyzed, the chemical examination proved that sixteen of them were bad and unsafe. The official State report for 1879 contains many pages of similar details. In fifteen days after the State Board of Health called attention to the results of this investigation, the citizens held a town meeting, at which it was _unanimously_ voted that the Board of Health of this town should adopt all proper methods to perfect and enforce stringent sanitary regulations, and promising them their most cordial support in all reasonable efforts they may make in the furtherance of this end. The Board of Health of another well-known resort, after a careful examination of the sanitary condition of Oak Bluffs and Martha’s Vineyard Camp-grounds, frankly said that “unless proper remedial measures were carried out, the abandonment of the place, as a residence for health, is but a question of time.” The State Board subsequently commended this local board for adopting wise sanitary regulations and carrying them out with such energy that the high reputation of the place as a health resort might be preserved.

The same report says: “It must not be taken for granted that this condition of things is confined to one place. Visits to various seaside resorts of a similar character on both north and south shores show little change for the better. Many individual cases are worse.”

The official inspection of many such summer resorts revealed sickening details connected with the large hotels and boarding houses. One hundred and fifty summer houses examined were, almost without exception, objectionable, on the score of danger to health, due in part to foul air, but more to contaminated well water. There is always a risk in the use of such water, and the only safe rule is to make privies and cess-pools absolutely tight, and frequently empty and disinfect them, so that they _can not_ poison the water supply. Nearly every State health report abounds in instances of the outbreak of typhoid fever due to bad well water, and one affirms that the majority of wells in the rural districts of that state are tainted.

As is my custom, in order to adapt my lectures on “Village Improvements” to local needs, I made a cursory inspection of the streets and private grounds in the town of ⸺, which revealed a prolific source of peril to its citizens. Though I had heard nothing of the actual experience of the place, I spoke in strong terms of the danger of an early outbreak of typhoid fever and diphtheria, from the proximity of vaults and wells. After the lecture I was informed that such a dire visitation had already desolated many homes, but it was regarded as “a mysterious visitation of Providence,” and nothing was done to abate the obvious cause of the pestilence. I find it exceedingly difficult to convince men of any danger from their water supply. They are apt to resent a disparagement of their wells as they would of their children, and yet I seldom inspect a town where there is not found urgent need of the warning, “LOOK CAREFULLY TO YOUR WELLS.” Gross sanitary defects are often found even around the homes of isolated farmers, with every natural advantage for drainage and healthfulness. Hence I advise that securing “better sanitary conditions in our homes and surroundings” be made prominent among the various objects of the “Village Improvement Associations” organized in many states, and now numbering nearly three hundred.

The unsanitary condition of Memphis invited the terrible scourge of yellow fever in 1878. The occurrence of four thousand deaths in one season compelled attention to the cause and remedy. If Memphis was then the filthiest and sickliest city of the South, it now claims to be the healthiest. The case demanded and received “heroic treatment.” Over forty-two miles of sewers have been built, on the most approved plan, with one hundred and ninety automatic flushing tanks, each discharging one hundred and twelve gallons of water twice a day. While collecting facts for a lecture there on “The Needs of Memphis,” I inspected the city, and especially the “man-holes,” in company with the city engineer, who had supervised their construction, and found in none of them any offensive odor. These improvements were costly, but the recent rapid growth of this city in population and wealth proves that these liberal expenditures were wise investments. The “death-pool” of 1878 now justly aspires to be a health resort. An excellent sewer system, with automatic flushing tanks, is now in use in Denver, Colorado. I made a similar examination of the man-holes there last October, with similar results, and received the testimony of a prominent physician, to the marked diminution of zymotic diseases since the completion of the new sewers.

Cumulative evidence on the danger of using tainted water might be given to an indefinite extent, like the following: Thirty-one out of one hundred inmates of a convent in Munich, affected with typhoid fever; the outbreak of typhoid fever in Princeton, New Jersey, two years ago; the fearful epidemic at Waupun, Wisconsin, in April last, and the terrible pestilence now desolating Plymouth, Pa. are all attributed to infected water. In Plymouth nearly one hundred persons have already died, and over one thousand have been prostrated—in the opinion of the physicians, poisoned by water pollution. Such facts should everywhere prompt to sanitary precautions, and enforce the motto, “Eternal vigilance is the price of public health.”

In a popular summer resort of Massachusetts there occurred eighty cases of typhoid fever during 1881, out of a population of only 1,500. The citizens were alarmed, and prompt and thorough investigation discovered and removed the cause. The mischief had been done mainly by tainted water. The remedies suggested by the board of health—clearing of premises, securing of better drainage and plumbing, removing of all decomposing matter, abolishing all cess-pools and leaching vaults, draining marshes and pumping out and cleansing all wells and cisterns that afforded chemical evidence of being tainted—were energetically applied. The owners of these beautiful cottages and villas spared no effort or expense to restore this attractive resort to its former salubrity. If any community of its size was ever more earnest, prompt and united in such a work of restoration, I should be glad to learn its name. In the face of peculiar difficulties on this rocky peninsula, nearly five miles of sewers were constructed. Hundreds of chemical analyses of the drinking water were made. Of the wells and cisterns so examined, nearly sixty per cent. contained water unfit for drinking or cooking. As a result of this renovation, the local board of health is quoted in the Massachusetts report for 1883 as saying: “These vigorous correctionary measures completely checked the epidemic, and not a single case of the fever has since appeared here that could not be traced to some other locality for its origin.”

Another seaside city, much resorted to in summer, with a regular population of over 3,000, after suffering severely from zymotic diseases, especially typhoid fever, requested the State Board of Health to investigate the cause of this excessive mortality. Nine tenths of the population here are crowded in one village of small area, having many narrow streets, with small house lots, necessitating a dangerous proximity of cess-pools, privy vaults and wells. This danger is increased by the nature of the soil, mostly sand or gravel, that facilitates rapid percolation. The climate itself is pronounced more equable and salubrious than that of any other part of the State, and therefore specially attractive to the health-seeker. The mean winter temperature is seven degrees warmer than that of Cambridge. The insular position of the town, and the sensible proximity of the Gulf Stream lend their combined influence to modify the extremes of temperature, such as exist in the inland parts of the State. The summer temperature of the water upon its shores renders sea-bathing recreative, invigorating and pleasurable, even to the delicate invalid. With such rare natural advantages for salubrity, the high death rate is traced to preventable causes. The water of eleven wells showed, on chemical analysis, a great degree of pollution. The remedial plans, prepared at the suggestion of the State Board of Health, were submitted to the action of the town meeting held February, 1884, and were favorably received. But at a subsequent meeting, this favorable action was reconsidered, and since that time no action has been taken.

The last two reports of the State Board of Health of New Jersey contain valuable accounts of the sanitary investigations of the health resorts of that state. The following statements are abbreviated from these volumes. Within thirty miles of New York City is to be found half the population of the state of New Jersey. Of this number, according to the judgment of engineers, chemists, physicians, and boards of health, not one half are supplied with water fit to drink. As our risks from impure water are even more than those from ordinary impure air, it behooves all to guard against any contamination of potable water. If there is a neglect of sanitary care, and especially of a good water supply, it is too late to adopt the policy of concealment, or to point to a death rate of from twenty-six to thirty as a justification, when so large a city as London can point to a death rate of only twenty per thousand, and many an English town of 30,000 inhabitants, to a death rate of only sixteen or eighteen. The sea coast of New Jersey, more than that of any other state, abounds in popular summer resorts. The State Board of Health has carefully inspected these resorts, notified the proprietors of existing defects, and reported them to the public when they were not remedied. Their first visits were often occasions of protest, and even of denunciation on the part of proprietors, many of whom, on sober second thought, were convinced of the truth, and corrected the evils complained of. The latest inspection says that the sanitary condition of most of these places has been greatly improved. In 1883 it is said of ⸺, where are six hotels and over one hundred cottages, “This locality shows no improvement in its care of sanitary conditions. No skilled attention is given to drainage. The water supply is mostly from driven wells, which are generally surface wells. Privy vaults are of the crudest description. Slop water is disposed of in cess-pools, often in close proximity to wells. This sanitary lawlessness has not been without its deleterious results.” The last report speaks of the same place as improving, but there are still some sanitary defects.

One popular resort shows some marked improvements. While some of the large hotels have still rows of cess-pools, they are kept in better condition than formerly. Still it has not equaled expectation in its efforts to provide a much needed system of sewerage. The hotels exhibit some of the very best and some of the very worst methods for the disposal of water-closet refuse. In one hotel enormous brick vaults had no modes of ventilation, and nothing but the shortness of the season protects the inmates. These New Jersey resorts are no worse than those in other states, and as a rule are salubrious and most desirable retreats, but the self-satisfied carelessness of some wealthy owners of hotel property has made light of these defects, and they have been tardy in their correction. Visitors in such hotels, before taking rooms, should have an expert make a sanitary inspection in their behalf.

These facts from different states clearly show that the sanitary condition of summer resorts is the question of first importance to all who frequent them, and that a rural location, naturally salubrious, has often proved a death-pool when made the home of a dense crowd in the hottest months of the year. This frequent outbreak of preventable diseases in large watering places proves the necessity of applied hygiene in such resorts, where the management often betrays gross ignorance or carelessness on this vital point.

In this respect the Assembly grounds at Chautauqua form a happy exception. Some details may suggest the changes and plans needed elsewhere. Last summer, while meeting lecture appointments there, I made a cursory inspection of the grounds around each of the four hundred and twenty-eight cottages in this “city in a forest,” including its numerous boarding houses. The village is very compact, and the cottages are sometimes too closely crowded together. But everywhere the sanitary conditions are admirable. The three essentials—pure air, pure soil, and pure water—are well assured. Special effort is made to guard these three “Ps.” No old fashioned privies are _now_ allowed. The last two nuisances of this sort were removed while I was on the grounds. Some ten public vaults are located at convenient points, each built of stone or brick, laid in cement, and thus made water tight. Each is _daily_ supplied with disinfectants, and emptied every other night, and then well cleansed with water. There are sixty-seven private vaults, made in like manner, water tight, and frequently emptied. The water-closet pipes emptying into them are said to be all carefully trapped. The waste is conveyed by night to farms far away from the grounds.

Every family is required to provide a barrel for garbage, kitchen slops and wash water, which is emptied _daily_. No soiled water may be thrown on the grounds. The daily inspection detects any violation of this rule. There are no alleys, lanes, back yards or dumping grounds where garbage can be thrown and secreted. There is no filth-saturated soil, and the atmosphere is not tainted with the gases of decay. The decaying leaves, so abundant in this forest city, are removed or burned.

Numerous wells, carefully guarded from surface drainage, and eight springs furnish pure water. Borings some thirty feet deep, near the engine house by the lake, have opened three flowing springs, the water in five-inch pipes rising seven feet above the lake. This proves to be a mineral water (pronounced by Dr. Edwards, the lecturer on chemistry, a wholesome chalybeate tonic), is forced into a large tank on the hill, and thence distributed in pipes near the surface over the grounds free to all. There was little to criticise in the sanitary condition of the grounds, and the few suggestions which I made were promptly carried out by the efficient superintendent.

WAYSIDE HOMES.

BY HELEN CAMPBELL.

No form of charitable work undertaken in this busy century holds more perplexity and uncertainty than that for women, who, whether for great or small offenses, have come under the ban of the law, and who pass from the shadow of the prison to confront a public feeling which is, in the main, so absolutely antagonistic as to leave small chance for reform, or hope of making new and better place.

It is certain that there is much justification for such feeling. There are few in whom the missionary spirit is strong enough to enable them to accept undaunted, the possibilities involved in receiving as a member of the family, a woman whose desire for reform may be outweighed a thousand times by the power of her appetites, and whose influence may bring contamination to all within its reach. Even in less dangerous cases, where youth and ignorance are the excuses for the violation of law, there is always the fear that association with older offenders has given a knowledge of evil that will work equal disaster, and thus the door is as effectually closed against the slight as against the confirmed transgressor. It is part of the popular conviction that work for women is far less productive of results than work for men, a conviction that has a certain foundation of truth. Even in the Water Street Mission of New York, in which the most apparently hopeless class was reached and held, McAuley was constantly baffled by this fact, and in time accepted it as inevitable. He did not question, more than other workers have done, why this was so, or how far the world was responsible for the state of things he bewailed, but came at last, by almost unconscious steps, to the conclusion given in a talk with the writer.

“You’ve wondered, at times, that we didn’t have more women here,” he said, a year or two before his death. “Don’t you know that you can haul in a hundred men to one woman? What it means, the good Lord only knows, but they don’t stay put. They cry an’ promise, an’ promise an’ cry, an’ you do for ’em with all your might, an’ all at once they’re off, an’ may be you never see ’em again.… When a girl’s once down, it isn’t once in five hundred times that you can pull her out. Take that very one you was so sorry for. She’s been to every meeting ’round here, an’ cried an’ begged to be helped. She’s been taken first to one ‘Home’ an’ then to another, an’ she’s run from every one back to her old life. The system’s wrong. That’s my opinion. You take a ‘Home’ where a lot are in together, an’ the devil’s let loose. They chew tobacco an’ chew snuff, an’ get drunk on the sly, an’ the old ones tell the young ones all their lives, an’ the last end is worse than the first, for they learn a lot of deviltry to add to their own. There ain’t but one way, as I can see, to save ’em. Keep ’em apart. Let Christian families that can, make up their minds to take one at a time; hedge her round; give her enough to do, an’ get her interested, an’ pray night an’ day she may be kept. That will save a good many, for it’s mostly worked where it’s been tried. But there ain’t anything in our work so discouragin’ as this very thing. What you going to do? These girls comin’ out of homes where a dozen, may be, has herded in one room, what do they know of decency or cleanliness? What can they know, I’d like to know? No, I tell you; the work’s got to begin at the beginning. Get hold of the children. Send them off. Do anything that’ll train them differently. They’re born in sin and born to sin, and the Lord only knows what’ll come if good men and women don’t wake up and take hold.”

Admitting the serious nature of the difficulties involved, it is quite certain that many of them have been born of an utterly false estimate of the relative degrees of guilt in men and women. Neither time nor space allows discussion of this point beyond the suggestion that in the present White Cross movement, and the questions that at once arise as the first necessity in any understanding of its nature or need, may be found the secret of much that has made against women. Simple justice, the last acquired and, it would seem, the hardest won of all virtues, makes chastity as binding an obligation upon man as upon woman, and gives to both, when repentant, the same pardon and the same hope for a future. Thus far, charity has ignored the woman, forcing her to bear not only the pain and sorrow of unblessed motherhood, but the sentence of perpetual banishment from the society whose laws she has defied.

It is at this stage that workers among the poor most often find her, hopeless, and in the large proportion of cases driven back to crime as her only resort. They form a great proportion of the inmates of any prison for women. Every town and village has its quota of candidates for reformatory or jail, and mourns, collectively and individually, over the terrible tendencies of this class, with small thought that prevention may be easier than cure, and that if children born to such conditions come into the world, society is bound to see that their training shall, as far as possible, neutralize the results of such inheritance. Society has no time for prevention. It proposes to pay for prisons rather than for industrial schools; to labor with full fledged criminals, rather than to crush out vice while still in embryo, and congratulates itself on the magnificent liberality of its provision for the criminal, and the remarkable success of the prison system as a whole.

Women are supposed to be merely occasional offenders, and that there are, in every state, hundreds outside of the prison who are habitual law breakers, and an equally large proportion within its walls, is a proposition received as incredible. Yet it was not till Massachusetts found herself forced to deal with eight hundred per year of such cases, that the first reformatory was organized, in 1865, and the number has increased steadily with the increase in population. County prisons, of which there were twenty-one, were, too often, simply nests for propagating vice. In a few of the larger ones great order and system prevailed. In the smaller ones there was next to none, and male and female prisoners, dirty, ragged and obscene, mingled together and interchanged lessons in new forms of vice. In all of them three classes of offenses were to be found, women convicts being sentenced usually for drunkenness, unchastity, or larceny; the relative prevalence of the three being indicated by the order in which they are given. The first class, wherever found, are most often Irish women, at, or past, the middle age. They are not criminals, though at times, in some cases, dishonest or unchaste. Often they are eager to reform, and yield to the temptation to drink as many men yield, for the momentary relief from grinding care and anxiety. Many of them become accustomed to the short sentences usually given by magistrates for this offense, and there are countless women who have had thirty, forty, and even fifty short imprisonments. A long term, or, in aggravated cases, imprisonment for life, affords the only security, the mere smell of liquor being often enough to awaken appetite and bring on a wild debauch. The three crimes can in almost every case be traced back to a neglected childhood.