standpoint. Race improvement in the United States is the general topic of the session, and "The Influence of City Environment on National Life and Vigor" is the special subject for consideration this evening. The program as a whole relates principally to physical conditions as affecting human welfare. Human welfare may be described under three heads: physical, mental, and spiritual. These three elements are co-related, each bound closely with the others, and together they represent the scope of all human endeavor. Without minimizing in the least the other two, it seems to me that at the present time our principal needs relate to the physical.

Physical welfare is the foundation of race welfare in its broadest sense. It may be likened to the constitution in our legal system. The constitution is the foundation of our laws. There is not a state law, nor a city ordinance, nor police regulation, that does not rest upon it or is not in conformity therewith, unless it be one that is voidable. Yet we think little about the constitution, as we are enacting or enforcing our local ordinances, because we take the constitution as a matter of course, or because it is so intimately connected with our political system that is requires no special thought.

Again, we look upon the beautiful dome of the National Capitol at Washington, and the legislative chambers beneath, and have scarcely a thought of the foundation upon which it all so securely rests; yet it is there, and without it the dome and the chambers could not meet our vision. So physical welfare seems to me to be the necessary foundation for the general welfare; and we should so perfect it that we may lose sight of it and give our contemplation and efforts to higher welfare. In other words, physical welfare is only a means to welfare on a higher plane.

A sound mind in a sound body, mens sana in corpore sano, is an aphorism that has come down to us from antiquity, expressing both a truth and a goal to be attained; but in the light of modern thought it is insufficient as a guiding sentiment, since it contains no mention of the spiritual, and this latter is included in the modern thought of human progress.

Just what human progress is, just what it means, cannot be defined. Writers of the day speak frequently of the uplift of the race, but there is no definition in this term, and yet, without understanding it, there is no doubt that we are all engaged in furthering human progress-the uplift of humanity.

There is in astronomy what is known as the true stellar motion. By this is meant that while the stars are revolving in their orbits, and the planets are also revolving upon their axes, and some stars seem fixed, there is a general movement of them all, a progress through space; where they are going and where they are from, we do not know, but we do know that they are moving. So with human progress and the uplift; it exists. We do not understand it, and the best we can do is to catch its trend and keep ourselves in proper relation to it.

In this movement, the physician, the sanitarian, and the hygienist endeavor to keep the individual in line-in his correct place as an individual in the ranks of humanity, as humanity is pressing forward to its destination. If the individual weakens, or meets with accident, the physician discovers the cause of the weakening and applies the remedy, or applies his surgical skill to repair

the results of accident. The sanitarian looks to the individual's environment and the hygienist to his physical development.

Analogous service is rendered by the lawyer, whose ideal function is to preserve justice in the ranks, and by the minister of the gospel or priest, who promotes morality and spirituality, these also being essential to human progress. All belong to an organism representing human progress, in which each part is a means and at the same time an end to every other part.

The physician, then, or the sanitarian or the hygienist, while ministering to the physical, is also contributing to the mental and spiritual, performing his part as others are performing theirs, absolutely necessary to the general welfare, yet only one of several units.

These thoughts are suggested by an effort to understand the correct position of those interested in physical welfare in their relation to the world's work and progress, for with an understanding of our proper relation we are better able to perform our allotted part.

Sanitation and hygiene, representing physical welfare, are essential to the fullest development of the mental and spiritual. I necessarily speak from my own point of view, but feel impelled thus to speak as one privileged with a special viewpoint.

How closely this subject of sanitation and hygiene is associated with the topics discussed by this Academy will be perceived, I am sure, in listening to the papers that are to be read by gentlemen distinguished for their philanthropy and research and their achievements in uplifting endeavor. In their discussions upon "Recreation and Morality," "Race Degeneration," "Race Improvement and a Children's Bureau," and "The Influence of City Environment," they will give contributions of value, not only to the physical, but to the general welfare.

It is not my purpose to delay the program by extended remarks, and I will at once, therefore, begin the introduction of the essayists of the evening. Remarks of the Very Rev. Thomas J. Shahan, Pro-Rector of the Catholic University of America, who presided at the session of Saturday afternoon, April 17th:

In a land of great political freedom, the chief obstacles to human progress are not found in the constitution of the state, but in the individual and the family; they are also seen to be partly physical and partly moral. The proper and natural growth of the individual is too often arrested by the introduction into his system of certain poisons that work incalculable evil both in the present and the future, since on the one hand they quench the light of the intellect and on the other light the fires of passion. Taken all together they represent a gross undue worship of the body which they slay insidiously while they seem to pamper and to flatter it. From these poisons, excessive alcoholism and the no less destructive drug habit, flows an ugly current of crime, insanity and unnatural disease, with all their fatal progeny. Through the spread of these poisons we soon behold the repulsive face of primitive barbarism leering at us from amid the highest social refinement; we behold reason itself dethroned incessantly from innumerable human temples, while the credulity of suffering mankind is so variously fed by many selfish interests

that it seems doubtful if the physical evils popularly laid up to medieval ignorance or superstition were really as great as the human damage rightly chargeable to the enormous abuse of drugs in modern times. Despite its incalculable advantages, modern society is everywhere face to face with this unhappy trinity of woes, whose tendency to increase has not yet been checked by all the efforts of a laudable philanthropy.

Another class of obstacles comes from the perversion of the family, physically and morally the primitive cell of human society. Its precincts are too often invaded in an unnatural way by many kinds of industry. In too many places the family ceases to be a little earthly heaven. Its calm dignity and sweet comfort are impossible amid certain surroundings of a mercenary industrial character. The mother has no nursery to adorn with her virtues, the father no haven of security and peace to return to after his day of toil. the child no training-ground for body and soul. All the tender, delicate sanctities of the home vanish before a selfish intensity of coarse toil, with all its implements and appliances. Moreover, the families that suffer most by this cruel conquest of their inferiors are usually the poorer ones, those whose share of natural and municipal advantages is the smaller and meaner one, whose surroundings at the best do not make for a rich development of the higher life of the spirit. No wonder that the family unit disintegrates easily and quickly amid such circumstances, and that the ancestral roof seldom shelters a second or a third generation. The children of such families tend to become a kind of social Bedouins, forever moving from place to place. having lost or never having known those tendencies of social conservatism that were or perhaps yet are so characteristic of the plain common people in many parts of the Old World. The evils that threaten the family have often been denounced by eloquent voices and by men in the highest places, but perhaps never in language so authoritative and far-reaching, so sober and grave as that of Leo XIII in his famous letter (1891) on the condition of the working classes.

However, the American mind is generously constituted, and to generous natures obstacles are usually a call to success, an incentive to action. In the words of Charles Sumner the American people have attained through representation and federation the mastery of this continent. And it is only fair to suppose that if they have solved the political problem on a scale unknown to all former nations they will in due time solve the social problem in a marvelously new and final way. With regard to this country, said Daniel Webster in 1849, "there is no poetry like the poetry of events, and all the prophecies lay behind the fulfilment." What the American man has accomplished in the way of free yet responsible government, is itself a great moral victory that permits us to hope for a still greater victory, the victory over selfishness, whatever form it assume, pleasure for its own low sake, pitiable unmanly fear, the passion of gain, social barbarism. All the obstacles to the development of character concerning which we shall hear this afternoon are quite certainly the outcome of selfishness. And it is precisely because the American people are pre-eminently an unselfish people and therefore a teachable, studious, inquiring people, that we may look forward in the future to a

race that shall justify splendidly the ways of God to His children of the New World. After all, it was not only to the individual and the family, but in a special manner to all Western mankind, that He gave on the one hand new and boundless opportunity, while on the other He anchored deep in their hearts a sacred instinct of religion that to not a few wise men seems the surest uplift and prop in the battle that stretches before us for whatever is good and desirable, fair and becoming in the social order, whose highest perfection, however, can never be reached unless both the individual and the family are first secured in all the native elements of their well-being.