Part 15

In keeping the Fourth one year not long ago, one hundred and seventy-one children lost one or more fingers; forty-one lost a leg, an arm, or a hand; thirty-six lost one eye, and sixteen lost both eyes; and two hundred and fifteen children were killed! This accounts for only the children; counting everybody, five thousand three hundred and seven people were killed or hurt. No wonder we begin to think that we ought to keep the Fourth in some other way.

In the City of Washington, on one Fourth of July, one hundred and four people were taken to the hospital; but the following year when no fireworks were allowed to be sold, the hospitals did not have a single patient from the accidents of the day.

Water, as well as fire, has its dangers. If you ever fall into the water, be sure to keep your mouth shut and your hands below your chin. Then paddle with your hands gently, and you'll swim, just as any other young animal does when first thrown into the water. Even your cat, who hates water, can swim easily when she falls in. If you keep your wits as she does, you will get along as well. Some people learn to swim just by trying by themselves.

If anyone in your party, when you are out boating or swimming, should be nearly drowned, the best way to revive him is to lay him, as quickly as possible, flat on his face on level ground, just turning his head a little to one side so that his nose and mouth will not be blocked. Then, kneeling astride of his legs, put both your hands on the small of his back and press downward with all your weight while you count three. This squeezes the abdomen and the lower part of the chest so as to drive the air out of the lungs. Then swing backward so as to take the weight off your hands, while you count three again; and then swing forward again and press down, again forcing the air out of the lungs. Keep up this swing-pumping about ten or fifteen times a minute for at least ten or fifteen minutes, unless the person begins to breathe of himself before this. Don't waste any time trying to hold him up by the feet, or roll him over a barrel so as to get the water out of his lungs. Just turn him over on his face as quickly as possible and get to work making a weight-pump of yourself on his back.

If there is any life left in the body at all when it is taken out of the water, you will succeed in saving it. It is very seldom, however, that anyone who has been under water more than five minutes can be revived.

And now the thing that I want you to be sure to remember, I have saved for the last. No matter what kind of accident happens, keep your wits about you and keep cool. Be calm and think what it is best to do, instead of letting yourself be frightened. Of course, get some one to help you as soon as you can and, if need be, call for help as loud as your lungs will let you. But use that wonderful "phone" system to send in and out the messages that will help you to help yourself by telling your muscles what to do.

III. THE CITY BEAUTIFUL

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.

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.