The national annual unnecessary loss of capitalized net earnings is about $1,000,000,000. Report on National Vitality By ELLEN H. RICHARDS Author of Cost of Living Series, Art of Right Living, etc. SECOND EDITION WHITCOMB & BARROWS BOSTON, 1912 Copyright 1910 By Ellen H. Richards Thomas Todd Co., Printers 14 Beacon St., Boston Never has society been so clear as to its several special ends, never has so little effort been due to chance or compulsion. Ralph Barton Perry, The Moral Economy.

The opportunity for betterment is real and practical, not merely academic. Men ignore Nature’s laws in their personal lives. They crave a larger measure of goodness and happiness, and yet in their choice of dwelling places, in their building of houses to live in, in their selection of food and drink, in their clothing of their bodies, in their choice of occupations and amusements, in their methods and habits of work, they disregard natural laws and impose upon themselves conditions that make the

Individual effort is needed to improve individual conditions. Home and habits of living. Good habits pay in economy of time and force. The hope is springing up in some minds that the entire problem of human regeneration will be much simplified when men shall have learned more fully the nature of their own lives, the nature of the physical world that environs them, and the interaction between this physical world and the spirit of man which is set to subdue it. Prof. George E. Dawson, The Control

T he relation of environment to man’s efficiency is a vital consideration: how far it is responsible for his character, his views, and his health; what special elements in the environment are most potent and what are the most readily controlled, provided sufficient knowledge can be gained of the forces and conditions to be used. To this end home life—in its relations to the child, the adult, and the community—is considered in connection with the effect on the home of the influences outside it, a

Community effort is needed to make better conditions for all, in streets and public places, for water and milk supply, hospitals, markets, housing problems, etc. Restraint for sake of neighbors. Quite slowly but surely, the idea is dawning on the social horizon that the persistence of conditions prejudicial to human prosperity is discreditable to a civilized community, and that economics if not ethics calls for their control. Alice Ravenhill. It is the new view that disease must be understood an

T he real significance of biological evolution has not been grasped by the people in general. It is that man is a part of organic nature, subject to laws of development and growth, laws which he cannot break with impunity. It is his business to study the forces of Nature and to conquer his environment by submitting to the inevitable. Only then will man gain control of the conditions which affect his own well-being. Sickness, we know, is the result of breaking some law of universal nature. What t

Interchangeableness of these two forms of progressive effort. First one, then the other ahead. Preventive medicine is the watchword of the hour, and enlistment in the cause can come only through education.... He who understands the dangers is thrice armed, and is trained and entitled to enlist in the home guard to protect the health of his household and neighbors. Dr. M. H. Rosenau, Harvard Medical School. The next generation of parents is being made strong or weak in home and school today by an

P rogress is a series of zigzags: now the individual goes ahead of the community; now the community outstrips the individual. The community cannot rise much above the level of the individual home, and the home rises only by the pull of the community regulations, or by the initiative of a few especially farsighted individuals. The steps need to be carefully measured, for if the family begins to rely on the State for the backbone it should have, it will not stay up, and its fall will be lower than

The child to be “raised” as he should be. Restraint for his good. Teaching good habits the chief duty of the family. Our success or failure with the unending stream of babies (one every eight seconds) is the measure of our civilization: every institution stands or falls by its contribution to that result, by the improvement of the children born or by the improvement of the quality of births attained under its influence. H. G. Wells, Mankind in the Making. Children are the most hopeful element of

T he ideal of “home” is protection from dangers from within —bad habits, bad food, bad air, dirt and abuse,—shelter, in fact, from all stunting agencies, just as the gardener protects his tender plants until they become strong enough to stand by themselves. The child’s home environment is certainly a potent factor in his future efficiency. But more than physical protection is that education in all that goes to make up profitable living, acquired by following the mother or nurse in her daily roun

There is no noble life without a noble aim. The watchword of the future is the welfare and security of the child. Love of home and of what the home stands for converts the drudgery of daily routine into a high order of social service. The economy of right uses depends largely upon the home-maker, and brings the return in health, happiness, and efficiency. [14] [11] Dr. Charles H. Chapin. [12] Mankind in the Making. [13] Dr. H. M. Eichholz, Inspector of Schools. Paper before Conference of Women W

The child to be educated in the light of sanitary science. Office of the school. Domestic science for girls. Applied science. The duty of the higher education. Research needed. No Christian and civilized community can afford to show a happy-go-lucky lack of concern for the youth of today; for, if so, the community will have to pay a terrible penalty of financial burden and social degradation in the tomorrow. President Roosevelt, Message to Congress, December, 1904. The loss of faith brings us by

O ne must not displace the other, for one cannot replace the other, but rather the home and the school must react on each other. The home is the place in which to gain the experience, and the school the place in which to acquire the knowledge that shall illuminate and crystallize the experience. The child should go out to the school with enthusiasm, and return to the home filled with a deeper interest and desire to realize things. In morals and manners the school can only give tendency or direct

Stimulative education for adults. Books, newspapers, lectures, working models, museums, exhibits, moving pictures. The efficient sanitarian is not so great when he conquers a raging epidemic as when he prevents an epidemic that might have raged but for his preventive care, and for this result his most continuous and effectual work is to educate—educate—educate. Wm. H. Brewer, New Haven Health Association, 1905. The essential fact in man’s history to my sense is the slow unfolding of a sense of c

In a store an advertisement reads: “Any kind of tea you prefer; no charge whatever.” She: “The women look so tired when they come in, and in ten minutes they are so rested and refreshed.” He: “Ready to go home?” She: “Why, no—ready to do some more shopping.” Spectator, The Outlook, December 18, 1909. S omething in motion and something to eat attract the crowd. The social worker is just beginning to realize what the manufacturer and the department storekeeper have long since found out. Why is it

Both child and adult to be protected from their own ignorance. Educative value of law and of fines for disobedience. Compulsory sanitation by municipal, state, and federal regulations. Instructive inspection. The strength of the State is the sum of all the effective people. Dr. Edward Jarvis, Massachusetts State Board of Health, 1874. When the Americans took charge of Bilibid Prison in Manila the death rate was 238 per 1,000 per year: by improving sanitary conditions, this death rate was reduced

G overnment is delegated to persons specially set apart for the oversight of the people’s welfare. Personal conduct was free from such delegated power in the Anglo-Saxon thought. The Englishman’s house was his castle inviolate. This was especially true of the early American settlers. Laws interfering with personal liberty, a man’s right to drink tea, to punish his own children, to beat his own wife, to keep his own muck-heap, have been deeply resented by the American citizen. Each step in the pr

There is responsibility as well as opportunity. The housewife an important factor and an economic force in improving the national health and increasing the national wealth. It would indeed seem that opposition to woman’s participation in the totality of life is a romantic subterfuge, resting not so much on belief in the disability of woman as on the disposition of man to appropriate conspicuous and pleasurable objects for his sole use and ornamentation. “A little thing, but all mine own,” was on

T here are about 40,000,000 women and girls in the United States. About 14,000,000 live in the country and have a direct and compelling power over the life of the community. In rural agricultural districts the home-keeper is the provider. She practically requisitions from farm and garden what she deems necessary for the family table. To an extent she makes the clothing and sews the house linen. She also exchanges her perquisites, egg money, perhaps, for furniture and ornaments. The itinerant ped

Mrs. Richards intended to embody the following material in Chapter VIII of the second edition. Because of her death it has seemed best to add it as an appendix. Whitcomb and Barrows....

T he checking of wastes of all description is much in the air, but there is less discussion about WASTE OF EFFORT than might be expected. Yet effort means time, and saving of time saves lives as well as money. Nearly every investigation of sanitary evils leads back to the family home (or the lack of one), and a great deal of the health authorities’ work is saving at the spigot while there is a hundred times the waste at the bunghole. The medical inspection of the schools was found to have little