Ries will carry on the propaganda, demagogues and quacks will become
less certain of their short-cut remedies, and _everybody will be made to
think_. The evolution of this newly awakened national interest in clean
milk follows the seven stages and illustrates the seven health motives
presented in Chapter II. I give the story of Robert M. Hartley because
he began and prosecuted his pure-milk crusade in a way that can be
duplicated in any country town or small city. Robert M. Hartley was a
strong-bodied, strong-minded, country-bred man, who started church work
in New York City almost as soon as he arrived. He distributed religious
tracts among the alleys and hovels that characterized lower New York in
1825. Meeting drunken men and women one after another, he first wondered
whether they were helped by tracts, and then decided that the mind
befogged with alcohol was unfit to receive the gospel message. Then for
fifteen years he threw himself into a total-abstinence crusade,
distributing thousands of pamphlets, calling in one year at over four
thousand homes to teach the industrial and moral reasons for total
abstinence. Finally, he began to wonder whether back of alcoholism there
was not still a dark closet that must be explored before men could
receive the message of religion and self-control. So in 1843 he
organized the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the
Poor, which ever since has remembered how Hartley found alcoholism back
of irreligion, and how back of alcoholism and poverty and ignorant
indifference he found indecent housing, unsanitary streets, unwholesome
working conditions, and impure food. [Illustration: FIGHTING INFANT
MORTALITY BY A SCHOOL FOR MOTHERS IN THE HEART OF NEW YORK CITY,--JUNIOR
SEA BREEZE] [Illustration: PROVIDING AGAINST GERM GROWTH AND ADAPTING
MILK TO THE INDIVIDUAL BABY'S NEED,--ROCHESTER'S MODEL DAIRY] Hartley's
instinct started the first great pure-milk agitation in this country.
While visiting a dis
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