The City’s Dirty Secret: A Plea for Seattle’s Health

SANITARY INTERESTS.

A book has lately made its appearance from an Eastern press, in which the general charge is made against the American people, that they are negligent of the appearance and cleanliness of their towns, and cite this as a source of physical ill-health and of mental and moral deterioration. That there is ground for the charge cannot be disputed, though it may be urged as a palliation that the country is new and hard to subdue, and, consequently, society and its belongings are comparatively under-organized as yet.

The criticism certainly applies to Seattle, and the application with proportionate force. At the same time there is no town where sanitary regulations should receive a greater share of public attention. A considerable area of our town site was, or originally was, water, and till a large part of the house drainage finds its way into the public streets and loiters there in the sun.

The condition of a town in respect to these things depends largely upon the direction and force of popular sentiment upon it, for "where there's a will there's a way." As mental conditions are affected by the physical, it follows that neither the highest muscular strength nor mental and moral health can co-exist with poisoned blood, which is an inevitable result in un-drained districts where every bit of drainage that comes releases from fetid fens and piles of decaying rubbish, a legion of invisible death-angels to scatter the germs of diphtheria, dysentery, typhus and ague broadcast through the community.

It is highly important that there should be a health board, numbering among its members competent drainage engineers, whose business it should be to keep the city clean. It is not a question of financial ability to carry out a thorough grade and sewage system with reasonable rapidity, so much as of how much the people desire it as compared with other things—what degree of precedence they are resolved to accord to it over other interests.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If public education and the sanitary science had received frequent attention they deserve and were brought up to the standard of thoroughness and perfection they should be, all the expense of our criminal machinery of government and its concomitants would be gradually dried up.

"All that a man hath will he give for his life," has been accepted a true saying. Money could not be wasted if economically and conscientiously expended for this object. It would in the end be better in the case of our citizens to pay a few dollars per annum for city improvements for the sake of health, than several times as much in doctor's and medicine bills, or if necessary, forego some luxuries or expense that may be sacrificed until this all-important public good is accomplished.