The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1910-03-26
AMERICANS AS
 PROCRASTlNATORS
While We Are Crying ''The Time Is Not Ripe," 600,- GOO Die Each Year in the United States The Need for 8 National Department of Health
Paul Kennaday. Exc1Nsive Service The Suwey Press Bureau.)

Paul Kennaday.
 Gxc1Hsive Service The Survey
 Press Bureau.)
 The time is not ripe, that is it! From the putting on of summer under wear, to the taking off of tariff taxes, from votes for Negroes and women. to putting on industry the burden of industrial accidents.-always the same Have patience! God is in Heaven!
 And so-the time is not ripe for a department of health and while the time is getting ripe. death stalks abroad, cutting off a, few hundred thousand here, a few hundred there, calmly by, and estimate that each year in these United States over 6Q0,- 900 of our fellows are sacrificed to 1g- norance and apathy.
 Sewers go on emptying into city wa ter supplies; merchants stop the truth from coming out and let the plague get into California; tenements are built to fill tuberculosis hospitals; and if it is demanded that the mighty hand of the national government be stretch ed to help the time is not ripe The very marrow of our bones. We have come to accept it as a sufficient an sWer, this-that the time is not ripe. And we proceed to trim our sails ac- cordingly. We compromise and we be- come practical we put on the wis dom of the serpent. and stay as harm by step, we viii accomplish this re- form. But death, at least. is radical. and when he sees his goal rushes straight on. with no thinking twice. and with no great long thinks between before he steps but once.
 So when Senator Owen introduces into the Senate of the United States the first real adequate bill to meet the problem of the conservation of our wasted national health-a bill for the establishment of a department of clothed with the prestige and the au- thoritv of membership in the presi- dents cabinet-when such a bill is pre- sented to Congress, the cry goes up from every quarter-the time is not ripe. But there are those who refuse to believe this.-who know the time W With GVeagpssmna Mareellus. that "something is rotten with the state"
 The principle of the Owen bill is right. So says the American Medical Physicians. So says the Committee of One Hundred, with it's thousands of men and women awake to the short comings of the multiplicity of govern ment bureaus, each doing little, some doing more, some doing less. and not all together doing a tithe of what tion, consolidation and uniflcation in one great department could do.
 The time is not ripe. congressman will be content to repeat on and on until each awakes to the fact that his constituents believe that the time is ripe. Personal interviews, letters, telegrams, resolutions, petitions, news papers articles. should go, and go at once, to the senators and representa- lives of each man and woman who re- fuses longer to be put off in favor of protected trees, plants and figs, who believe in a protecting department of health as much 1as in a protecting de- partment of agriculture.
 The authorities are agreed that with our present knowledge the death rate of the people of this country may be cut in two. It is time the things were done. The time is ripe, for radicals, reformers. whatever their other creeds, charity workers-rich or poor. founded or without funds to get together and to state squareIy and openly, without eQuivocation what is needed and what is demanded
 Until then, always the a1l-suffieient time is not ripe.