In the story about America's "Front Door" you learned that United States health officers meet every ship that enters an American harbor. If there is one case of yellow fever, smallpox or bubonic plague on board, the ship must wait outside long enough to see if other people on board are affected. The sick person must be removed to a pest-house and the ship disinfected. This is called going into quarantine. If certain dreadful diseases were allowed to come into our country, they might run across it like a prairie fire and cause thousands of people suffering and death. Sometimes our seaports are closed to ships coming from foreign cities where these diseases exist. Rats are known to carry them as well as people, so warfare is waged against wharf rats. Foreign emigrant people are not allowed to come into our country at all if they have tuberculosis, or contagious diseases of the eyes and skin. There are pure food laws to stop unfit food from coming into the country, or from being shipped from one state to another.

The health officers of states take up the work of protecting the people where the government leaves off. A state may quarantine against another state or city, that is, it may refuse to allow trains and boats to come from them if certain contagious diseases become very bad. States compel doctors to report contagious diseases, and make people who have smallpox, scarlet fever, or diphtheria put cards on their houses and obey quarantine laws. Children with measles, mumps, whooping cough and chickenpox cannot go to school. States inspect factories to see that workers are not overcrowded, that guards are put on machines to prevent accidents, that good light and air is supplied, and that children under a certain age are not at work for wages. States have pure food laws, too, to punish people who make or sell unfit food in the state. In one city, not long ago, many barrels of dirty sugar were seized. The sugar was sweepings from sugar refineries. It was sold to candy makers. There were disease germs in that sugar. Don't you think men who would sell such sugar, and men who would buy and make candy with it should be sent to prison?

In cities, a great deal more has to be done to protect the health of the people. Dirt is a disease breeder. Dirt, you know, is not just black earth. It is matter out of place. Mud is a fine thing in a rice field, but it is dirt on a little boy's face. So, kitchen refuse is garbage in a house, but it is good food in a chicken yard and pig pen. Old boxes and newspapers litter a house, but are fine for kindling fires. Sewage water and stable soil poison people, but make plants in a field grow. Tin cans, old iron, old shoes, rags, bottles and bones can be made over into useful things in factories, and junk men will often give country children bright new pennies for saving them. If they cannot be sold they can be buried and, with ashes, used to fill in holes. On farms, and even in towns, where homes have large lots, each family can use or destroy its waste.

In cities, people have no gardens or chickens or pigs. Very often they burn gas for cooking, and cannot use up kindling. Bonfires in narrow alleys and on streets are dangerous, and destroy pavements. There must be good public housekeeping to take care of all the waste of all the people, or there would be dirt, disorder and sickness that the cleanest person and the cleanest family could not avoid.

Public housekeeping in cities begins at street gutters and back gates. It is just like family housekeeping on a big scale. A family has a waste paper basket, a slop pail, a rag bag and an ash can, and does not allow members of the family to mix different kinds of waste, or to scatter trash. The streets and alleys are everybody's floor. Everybody has to pay the city a little in taxes to keep the public floor clean, and to carry away, destroy or use the waste. Everyone is expected to help in this work, by following the same sensible rules that orderly families make for themselves.

In the alley behind each house there must be covered iron garbage and ash cans. These are collected in separate wagons. Other wagons take away junk. Ashes and street sweepings are used for filling in low ground. In this way green parks have been made on swamps. Bones are sold to factories, to be ground into bone meal. One factory buys old iron and other metals. Another takes old shoes, another the wooden boxes and furniture. Rags and paper go to a paper mill. Garbage is burned in great furnaces that often save the fat for soap factories. London, in its poorest part, burns garbage to heat water for public baths, and to make steam to run the machinery of laundries.

Well managed cities take all this waste away every day, or at least three times a week, and they do it early in the morning. Street sweeping is done at night when there are few people about. Then big, rotary sweepers, drawn by horses, whirl the street soil up into covered wagon boxes. In the day time, men go over the streets with long-handled brush brooms, dust pans and carts and water cans. They work all the time. Horses make soil, produce wagons and peddlers drop vegetables and fruits, coal wagons scatter lumps and dust, untidy people throw away papers, fruit skins and cigar stumps. Sometimes streets have to be scraped. Asphalt and cement walks and roadways are washed with a big hose. In Paris, miles of beautiful avenues are washed every morning before breakfast. The water carries the dust into the sewers. In most cities street car companies must keep the streets on which their tracks run, clean. They must sprinkle the tracks in summer to lay the dust, and clear away snow in the winter. The city sprinkles the roadways of the parks and boulevards, and waters the grass. House owners, on well-kept streets, pay for having sprinkling done.