Various

“ See how much trouble we have had, after a century of experiments, in realizing the benefit of vaccination, the only nearly infallible remedy we have against disease. Surely a country ought to guard itself as much as possible against sickness and death, and should do everything that will conduce to that end, as we do all that is possible to cure a man ill with pneumonia or any other disease. But we should not delude ourselves with illusions, and we have to confess that the efficacy of the measures which we take to satisfy our conscience is very doubtful. ”

“ At Hampton I found the opportunity, in the way of buildings, teachers, and industries provided by the generous, to get training in the class room, and by practical touch with industrial life to learn thrift, economy, and push. I was surrounded by an atmosphere of business, Christian influence, and a spirit of self-help that seemed to have awakened every faculty within me, and caused me for the first time to realize what it meant to be a man instead of a piece of property. ”

“ We believe, however, that in the deliberate choice of plain living by an influential portion of society there lies a greater potency of social reform than in all the schemes of socialistic reconstruction. The most hurtful thing in the world to-day is the false glamour of wealth. It is against this evil influence that we want an insurrection, not against capital as such. Weaken the fascination of wealth, and, in the same degree that you do so, you increase the moral responsibility of those who are its possessors. The luxury of the present age has run to a dangerous extreme. ”

“ Why should not the same be true of the genuine negro music? The stock is African, the ideas are African, the patting and dancing are all African. The veneer of civilization and religious fervor and Bible truth is entirely superficial. The African is under it all, and those who study him and his weird music at short range have no difficulty in recalling the savage conditions that gave it birth. ”

“ It is impossible to say how great is the liability of contracting disease from milk. Sometimes the subject looms up before us in gigantic proportions. When our papers are describing the occurrence of hundreds of cases of typhoid fever in a city, all traced to a milk supply, the seriousness of the problem is very apparent, and very likely we stop drinking milk for a season. But when, on the other hand, we remember the millions of people that are drinking milk daily without injury, and remember that our forefathers have done the same, we grow graver and begin again our old custom. ”

“ We can not tell where our flour or meat comes from, or our apples or sugar. Why should we be more disturbed over milk than other foods? Indeed, until recently we have had no especial interest in the milk problem, and have taken milk as it has been offered without question, except as to its being pure milk unadulterated with water. But the rapid discoveries of bacteriology, which have shown milk to be such a good locality for bacterial growth, have been raising some very significant questions. We have been told of the countless millions of bacteria which we have been drinking daily. ”

“ The effect of mortality on the whole is, moreover, not to diminish natality, but rather to favor it. The death of an adult leaves some position vacant, and makes room for the institution of a new household and the birth of other children. So when a rich old man dies, the money he leaves helps set up his children in life; and when a poor old man dies, a burden is taken away from his descendants, who had to support him and who can now marry and have children. Some of the parallelisms in the movements of population which statisticians have observed may be explained thus. ”

“ Who that holds any truth, scientific or other, does not feel impelled to seek for it continually a wider interpretation and application? Not otherwise is it, we hold, with religious doctrines; they have their own law of growth and development, and he who would arrest the process condemns them to atrophy and decay.
It is charged against both the scholars we have mentioned that they speak of the Bible as literature, and say that in determining its meaning we must keep in view the same class of considerations which would guide us in dealing with other literary monuments. ”

“ Most persons who thus hesitate to use milk have simply a vague fear, without knowing just what is to be feared. When we put together all the facts in our possession we find that there is good reason for believing that milk is sometimes concerned in the distribution of the following well-known diseases and some obscure ones: The first is tuberculosis, which is a disease attacking the cow, and, if located in the mammary gland, may infect the milk with tubercle bacilli, and may subsequently produce the disease in the person who drinks the milk. ”

“ They do not demand of the Bible perfect agreement with either scientific or historic truth; they are content if they find in it the spiritual basis of human life, a scheme of thought that links the individual human being with an infinite origin and an infinite destiny. From their standpoint the value of the Bible for the highest moral purposes would in no way be increased if every word in it which touches on scientific or historical questions had the seal of all the academies in the Old World and the New. ”

“ The fact that, if the plague reaches us at all, it must come by sea, that a long voyage must be made before it can reach us, and that the disease will most probably appear on board ship before arrival at any American port—all these conditions are in our favor. The General Government should take upon itself the control of all measures to prevent the introduction of infectious diseases from without. Quarantine detention is a relic of ignorance of the true nature of infectious diseases. ”

“ If the Pasteurized milk is sold for a price much higher than ordinary milk it will not be a commercial success, for the vast majority of people prefer to save the one or two cents per quart, and run the rather slight risk of trouble from the milk. If it can be sold in our cities, as in Copenhagen, for the same price or a price only slightly higher than that of ordinary milk, it is hardly doubtful that it would soon come into favor, for who would not prefer milk that is safe from disease germs if the price is the same? ”

“ Having found a pupil's bent, he sought to turn him into a corresponding course, "and never tried to make a poor naturalist out of one who might become a good doctor or teacher." In his lectures he was earnest and enthusiastic, not as good a speaker as writer, and sometimes betraying his trouble to find the right word; "but he knew how to win the love of his pupils for his subject, and, while trying to make the comprehension of the matter not too difficult, to keep interest alive by occasional glances at the theoretical significance of the facts. ”

“ Miss Kingsley defines one of the fundamental doctrines of African fetich as being that the connection of a certain spirit with a certain mass of matter, a material object, is not permanent. "The African will point out to you a lightning-stricken tree and tell you that its spirit has been killed; he will tell you when the cooking pot has gone to bits that it has lost its spirit; if his weapon fails, it is because some one has stolen or made sick its spirit by means of witchcraft. In every action of his daily life he shows you how he lives with a great, powerful spirit world around him. ”

“ It is probable, therefore, that the small community can hardly feel itself any better off in regard to the milk supply than the larger city. It is, of course, easier to trace responsibility for bad milk if we know where it comes from, but it is less likely to be very bad if it comes from a large number of sources and is thoroughly mixed. The milk in the large city is perhaps forty-eight hours old when it is received by the consumer. But it has been kept on ice, has perhaps been filtered, and many of its bacteria may have been killed by the long-continued cold temperature. ”

“ Along the great rivers of the South or in the islands of the East strange and beautiful flowers occur individually or in small groups, but the traveler looks in vain for myriads of blossoms giving a distinctive coloring to the landscape itself. It was long the popular notion that the colors of flowers were of no importance except as they gave human pleasure. ”

“ I had some doubt how he would comment on my errand, when I told him that I was on my way to attend the Negro Conference at Tuskegee. Imagine my surprise when he exclaimed: "Going to Tuskegee, are you, to see Booker Washington? Just let me tell you there's a man that's got the right idea of things. He's teaching the negroes to work. ”

“ The question seems a reasonable one to ask, To what authority shall we look for knowledge and interpretation of these spiritual truths which are not accessible by scientific study? How shall we know that they are truths at all? I am aware that here the testimony of Christian conscientiousness is sometimes held to be the court of last resort, which I interpret to mean that if one intuitively reaches the conclusion that something is true it is true, the most positive evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. ”

“ Is the danger from milk so great as to suggest that we should give up our habit of drinking milk as they have largely done in Europe, or is this danger so slight that we can well afford to neglect it? We can not avoid all sources of disease even if we would. ”

“ By having liquors examined, and only pure liquors sold, and condemned liquors destroyed, precisely as in the case of unclean or impure meats, milk, fruit, and confectionery; much could be practicably, and in a minimum lapse of time, accomplished to the decrease of the liquor evil. The prohibitionists themselves, by placing and replacing and abolishing and experimenting with all sorts of statutes upon the statute-book, have accustomed us to State regulation of the sale of intoxicants, and, least of all, can complain of yet one more experiment toward the decrease of drunkenness. ”

“ It will be seen from these figures that the plague still rages with undiminished virulence in the capital of western British India. The abatement of the disease during the summer months and its increased severity during the colder season are not directly due to the effects of temperature. In the warm season many of the natives sleep out of doors, while during the colder weather they crowd into small, unventilated, filthy rooms. It is the opinion of practically all observers at Bombay that the recrudescence of the disease during the winter is due to this overcrowding. ”