answer to these questions can spring forth from one's preconceptions. An answer more difficult of attainment, but far nearer the truth, will emerge from the study of people combined with an examination of practical results. The results must be judged by the proportion of the population reached as well as by the effectiveness of methods upon those who are reached. Then the participation of individuals and of organizations will be enlisted locally or generally in a common effort for higher standards of health and of happy, efficient living. Then the health program will infuse itself into the program of Americanization, for these same principles are the right foundation of the general Americanization program. Both in their application to the program of Americanization and also to the procedures of medical and health work, the principles of this chapter are based upon the idea that Americanism is not a quality, but an achievement. Its attainment must be through participation in a many-sided community life, in which individuals of all racial origins shall share, and to which each shall contribute. People learn to adapt themselves to the common life chiefly by participation in some aspect of this life as individuals or as members of some organization. The agencies of government, and all organized cooperative activities for mutual benefit, must be adapted to serve individual needs. The principle of authority must be given its place, but the principle of democracy must dominate it. Then the mutual respect of individuals for one another will maintain freedom, while the sense of a common purpose will sustain law. II SICKNESS AMONG THE FOREIGN BORN MANY times the question has been asked: "What makes you think there is a health problem of the immigrant apart from that of the native born? What statistics have you to indicate any such thing?" That is a difficult question to answer, for there is a grave lack of statistical data, including racial factors. We know that sickness is a serious handicap to all workers, affecting native as well as foreign born. There is a general unanimity among the various studies that have been made as to the loss of time through sickness. The U. S. Commission on Industrial Relations, 1915, estimated that "each of the thirty-odd million wage earners in the United States loses on the average nine days a year through sickness." This estimate corresponded closely to the statistical evidence from health-insurance systems abroad. Since the report of this commission appeared, a number of studies have been conducted in the United States, and the estimate has been substantially confirmed. Thus in the seven sickness surveys made by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company among 1 Margaret Loomis Stecker, Some Recent Morbidity Data, p. 22, Table VII. |