regulation might be contrived for use in different localities.
Districts could be classed in grades determined by the position of each
district in the scale of infant mortality, and in those in which the
rate was highest the hygienic standard could be made most stringent and
onerous upon the house owner. This would force up the price of house-
room, and that would force up the price of labour, and this would give
the proprietors of unwholesome industries a personal interest in
hygienic conditions about them. It would also tend to force population
out of districts intrinsically unhealthy into districts intrinsically
healthy. The statistics of low-grade districts could be examined to
discover the distinctive diseases which determine their lowness of
grade, and if these were preventable diseases they could be controlled
by special regulations. A further extension of these principles might
be made. Direct inducements to attract the high birth-rates towards
exceptionally healthy districts could be contrived by a differential
rating of sound families with children in such districts, the burthen
of heavy rates could be thrown upon silly and selfish landowners who
attempted to stifle sound populations by using highly habitable areas
as golf links, private parks, game preserves, and the like, and public-
spirited people could combine to facilitate communications that would
render life in such districts compatible with industrial occupation.
Such deliberate redistribution of population as this differential
treatment of districts involves, is, however, quite beyond the
available power and intelligence of our public control at present, and
I suggest it here as something that our grandchildren perhaps may begin
to consider. But if in the obscurity of this footnote I may let myself
go, I would point out that, in the future, a time may come when
locomotion will be so swift and convenient and cheap that it will be
unnecessary to spread out the homes of our great communities where the
industrial and trading centres are gathered together; it will be