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DISEASES AND THEIR CAUSES
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these new bathing installations must represent, how they must tend to depopulate hospitals, and convalescent homes and asylums, and shelters for the decrepit and unfit, we shall try to show later, through comparative figures. The German nation is beginning to focus its energy in the schools as a centre for the prevention of disease, and by-and-bye, though, despite the economical ways of the German nation, the cost of schools may grow, yet there will be a saving in other departments. Early prevention will take more and more the place of cure, and early prevention is a pleasant thing—a matter of pure air, flashing water, sunny spaces, a kind of teaching and training that is almost perforce gentle. Such a training has lovely bye-products— is very rich in these. One need not be an optimist to prophesy that it must sooner or later re-create the atmosphere, not of schools only, but of homes and cities.

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It is said that skin diseases disappeared rapidly at the school bath centres. But apart from the more familiar order of good result from washing there are others, less familiar, less direct. We may be allowed to turn aside here for a moment to glance at some