One morning I stopped a moment on the street to speak to a friend. Her
little nephew had just finished eating some candy, and down went his
candy-bag on the pavement. His aunt happened to see it. "Oh, no,
Claude," she said, "don't you see the big green can there? Better put
it into that." But Claude was only three years old; and the can was so
tall that he could not tell what it was, till we led him up to it.
Do you have cans like these in your town, too? It is good to think
that every one of us, even such little fellows as Claude, can help to
keep the city beautiful. But it is not simply to make things look nice
that we have so many cans--cans for ashes, cans for papers, cans for
food scraps. No indeed, it is to keep the city clean and make it fit
for people to live in; for if dirty papers and scraps were left to
blow about the streets, they would fill the air with germs and filth.
Any dust that blows about the streets is likely to be carrying disease
germs with it. That is why we have sprinklers driven through the
streets to wet them and to keep down the dust; and why, in large
cities, the streets are thoroughly flooded at night. If the streets
are kept damp and clean, then the air above them is cool and fresh and
pure.
How does the city get rid of all the dirt and waste? From every house
there are two kinds of waste. Some is taken away in pipes from the
sink and bathroom out into pipes that run under the street, and these
carry it away from the city to some stream or deep water that takes it
entirely away from the town.
The waste stuffs that are not watery, but solid--cabbage leaves, apple
cores, potato parings, and other scraps from the kitchen are carted
away and burned or fed to pigs. The ashes and tin cans are carted
away, also, and used in making new land or filling up hollow places.
Besides taking away the dirt, cities are careful to get clear, pure
drinking water. They are very, very careful about this; and they
usually have the water tested often, because, as you have learned,
even water that looks perfectly pure may give people typhoid fever.
That is why, when you are out in the country, on a picnic perhaps, you
must not drink from the streams. They may receive the drainage from a
farmer's barnyard, or the sewage from some house.
The more we all learn about these things, the more careful will the
city be to protect her people. To be sure, most cities now have Boards
of Health who employ men and women to go about and see that the food
in the stores is clean--no flies, no dust, and no tobacco smoke on it.
They have laws, too, about keeping milk clean; and in New York alone
these laws have saved the lives of thousands of babies. And they have
laws about the care of streets and buildings and cars and parks and a
great many other things.
In all these things we have been talking about, I want you to be
thinking how you can help. For a city is made up of people--boys and
girls and men and women. The city is what its people make it; and
everyone must help, even the smallest children, no older than little
Claude.
The first and most important thing for you to do is to keep yourself
clean and tidy. And the next thing is for you to keep your back yard
as well as your front yard and the school yard and the street free
from papers and sticks and cans and old playthings. You can put away
your things when you are through playing; or, if you are making a
railroad or a town or a playhouse, you can leave it looking nice and
tidy. You can help chiefly by putting away your own things. You know
the old saying, "A workman is known by his chips"; and a good workman
always works in an orderly way.
When you eat apples or bananas or oranges, don't throw the skins or
peelings about, but put them in a garbage can or swill bucket or cover
them with soft dirt in the garden or stable yard; and don't throw
peanut shells, or scraps of paper and the like, about the streets or
parks. You should begin to notice all these things and talk about
them, and that will make other people begin to think about them, too.
Then you can make gardens instead of leaving bare, untidy back yards.
I think that nicely kept vegetable gardens are almost as pretty as
flower gardens. If you cannot mow the lawn, you can at least cut the
long grass on the edges; and that makes such a difference! It is
wonderful how much boys and girls can do in making and keeping a city
really beautiful.
I hope that you have plenty of room to play in now. Of course, when
you grow up, you will see that there are plenty of playgrounds and
parks for the children. We are beginning to find out that the richest
and the most beautiful city is the one whose streets are lined with
families of happy, rosy-cheeked children. So, you see, the "City
Beautiful" is the one that takes best care of her children, and she
can do this only by keeping her streets and houses perfectly clean and
seeing that the food her people get is fresh and good, and their
drinking water pure. If the city or town you live in is not like this,
be sure you do your very best to make it better.
[Illustration: WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE A BACK YARD LIKE THIS?]
[Illustration: OR LIKE THIS?]
There is one great evil that for hundreds and hundreds of years has
been known wherever people are crowded together, and even in the open
country, too; and which has been the cause of more untidiness and
uncleanliness and unhappiness and disease than any other evil ever
known. And that is the drinking of alcohol. People don't drink clear
alcohol, but they can get a great deal of it--enough to poison them
badly--in the fermented drinks you learned about some time ago.
In the days when your grandfather was a little boy, every man thought
that ale and wine and whiskey were good foods for him when he was
well; and good medicine when he was sick. He believed that they gave
him an appetite, and increased his strength. But now we have found, by
carefully studying the effects of alcohol, in laboratories and in
hospitals, that these beliefs were almost entirely mistaken. We know
that all that wine, beer, and whiskey do is to make people feel better
for a little while, without making them actually stronger or better in
any way. In fact, in most respects these drinks make them weaker and
worse instead.
Perhaps you will ask, "How do whiskey and wine and beer do us harm?"
And here is only part of the answer: (1) They tire the heart and, by
enlarging the blood pipes in the skin, make the heart pump too much of
the blood out to the skin. In this way they make a person feel warmer
when he really is not any warmer. (2) They make the liver work too
hard. (3) They dull the brain, so that it cannot think so clearly or
so well. (4) If one drinks them frequently, it is harder for him to
get well when he is sick; more people die out of those who drink
alcohol than out of those who do not.
Alcohol is a _narcotic_; that is, it deadens our nerves, for the time
being, to any sensations of pain or discomfort, much in the same way
that a very small dose of _morphine_ or _opium_ would. We may imagine
it does us good because, for a little while after drinking it, we may
cease to feel pain or fatigue or cold; but, instead of making us
really better and able to do more work, it is dulling our nerves so
that we work more slowly and more clumsily. Men who have carefully
measured the amount of work that they do have found that they do less
work on days when they take one or two glasses of beer or wine than
they do on days when they drink only water.
The great insurance companies have found that those of their policy
holders who drink no alcohol at all live nearly one fourth longer and
have nearly one third fewer sicknesses than those who drink alcohol
even in moderate amounts.
Indeed, so strong is the evidence as to the bad effects of alcohol,
and so steadily is it increasing, that it will probably not be very
many years more before the drinking of wine or beer by intelligent,
thoughtful people will have become less than half as common as it is
now.
Strong, healthy men may be able for a long time to drink small amounts
of liquor without noticing any harmful effects; but all the time the
alcohol may be doing serious harm to their nerves and brain and
kidneys and liver and blood vessels, which they will not find out
until it is too late to stop the trouble.
Useless and bad as alcohol is for full-grown men and women, it is even
worse for young and growing children; and no child, and no boy or girl
under the age of twenty-one, should ever touch a drop of it, except in
those rare instances where it may be prescribed as a medicine by a
doctor, just as many other drugs are, which in larger doses would be
poisons.
Fortunately, it will be no trouble for you children to let it alone
entirely; for not one of you would like the taste of it the first
time--or, indeed, for the matter of that, for the first ten or twelve
times--that you tried to drink it, if you should be so foolish. This
is one striking difference between alcohol and all other foods and
drinks. Children have absolutely no natural liking, or taste, for the
drinks that contain it, as they have for meat, milk, sugar, apples,
and the other real foods. This is Nature's way of telling them that it
is not a real food, and not needed in any way for their growth and
health. Let it alone absolutely, until you are at least twenty-one
years old; and by that time you will probably have become so convinced
of the harm that it is doing that you will never begin using it at
all.
What we have been saying so far applies, of course, only to the
moderate use of alcohol. How terrible the effects of the long or
excessive use of alcohol are, you don't need to learn from a book. All
you have to do is to keep your eyes open on the streets, and see the
drunken men reeling along the sidewalk, and the wrecks of men that
hang around the saloons. The poorhouses and the jails and the insane
asylums are filled with them. The most terrible thing that can happen
to anyone is to become a drunkard. The best and safest and only
sensible thing to do is to keep away from the only stuff that makes
drunkards. It may do you the most terrible harm, and it cannot do you
the slightest good.
Your city can never become the "City Beautiful" so long as this evil
mars it; and, as you grow up, I hope you will do all you can toward
making the right kind of city and home.