640 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
so many years if typhoid had sought its victims chiefly from those classes. Philanthropy, in the sixth stage, taught the aver- age man the value of his life and the possibility of enhancing its value by the expenditure of adequate corporate funds, thus ushering in the last and crowning epoch in the evolution of pub- lic sanitation, the socialistic, when the average man votes taxes to improve society's health.
Philanthropic sanitation was a product of the great, bloodless revolution that in England grew out of the terrible premises of the French Revolution. Adam Smith discovered labor to the English press ; Ricardo fought the corn laws by discovering laborers; Malthus fixed the genus under an iron law of want; the arch-agitator Brougham argued the responsibility of Parlia- ment then the favored classes for the betterment of labor's condition. Dickens and Reade were concrete and painted hor- rible pictures of London and England, their schools and prisons. Kingsley and the romance school prophesied a bright future when capital and labor should be one in motive and interest. The Poor Law Commission of 1832 furnished Carlyle with sta- tistical material for soul-stirring impeachments of "the cold, dead, infinite injustice" of the existing methods of distribution. The Commission on the State of Health in Large Towns reported in 1842 that the English language lacked usable words to pic- ture the filthy condition of the great towns, and urged parliamen- tary interference on behalf of the masses. The movement was aided by the spectacle of logicians like James Stuart Mill flut- tering about and protesting man's inherent right to be filthy and sick and despised and self-loathing. In the words of Spencer, the only one of these individualists who has lived to see, without repenting, the folly of their opposition to sanitary regulations: " Bad drainage, overflowing cesspools, festering graveyards, impure water, and filth and humidity of low lodging-houses are effective means of eliminating the less fit." State altruism was challenged, too, by the chronic political decrier of centralization, who as late as 1848 opposed the Public Health Act because it was "un-English and unconstitutional," "savoring of Crom- wellism," "like a Russian ukase," and "calculated to deprive
