] there have come to us tidings of a visitation of
pestilence which have seemed to some men very disquieting, and to
some heavy with menace. From Italy, the land beyond the Alps; from
Spain, the land beyond the Pyrenees; from seaports in France and
cities of the plain, we hear that the cholera has been striking down
its victims. The Phantom with the deadly breath has shown strange
caprice in his coming and going; but when he has been suspected to be
nigh at hand, wild-eyed Panic has shown herself as of old. It is sad
and discouraging to find that, spite of all our boasted progress--all
that science has taught us, and all that we are supposed to have
learnt--the attitude of the multitude when certain dangers threaten,
appears to be as it was, and that we still hear of shuddering
wretches trying to fight a dreaded enemy by letting off old muskets
and drenching portmanteaus with Condy's fluid.
Such things have been before. Must they recur again? Philosophers
comfort us with the assurance that our brains are larger than those
of our forefathers. Nay, that the convolutions of the said brains are
more complex. How about the _moral fibre?_ Are we never to have
stouter hearts or more "bowels and mercies?" In the face of the same
circumstances, will men for ever show themselves the same? Or is it
that all these stories of mad stampedes and of chaotic anarchy
breaking loose here and there--anarchy gibbering, blind, profligate
and senselessly cruel--are true only of exceptional communities, as
yet unaffected by the great lift which optimists confidently believe
in, and which they unhesitatingly assure us is steadily going on?
The cholera has abated, we are told; as we were told it would.
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