at the
time, but was considered a fair butt for genial ridicule and chaff, yet
even there the trouble had its serious side. Through all those
communities there stalked a well-known and dreaded spectre, the
so-called "congestive chill," what is now known in technical language as
the pernicious malarial paroxysm. These were like the three warnings of
death in the old parable. You would probably survive the first and might
never have another; but if you had your second, it was considered
equivalent to a notice to quit the country promptly and without counting
the cost. In my boyhood days in the Middle West, I can recall hearing
old pioneers tell of little groups of one or more families moving out on
to some particularly rich and virgin bottom-land and losing two or
three or more members out of each family by congestive chills within
the first year, and in some cases being driven in from the outpost and
back to civilization by the fearful death-loss.

A pall of dread hangs over the whole west coast of Africa. The factories
and trading-posts are haunted by the ghosts of former agents and
explorers who have died there. Some years ago one German company had the
sinister record that of its hundreds of agents sent out to the Gold
Coast under a three years' contract, not one had fulfilled the term! All
had either died, or been invalided and returned home. It was malaria
more than any other five influences combined that thwarted the French in
their attempt to dig the Panama Canal and that made the Panama Railroad
bear the ghastly stigma of having built its forty miles of track with a
human body for every tie.

Malaria ever has been, and is yet, the great barrier against the
invasion of the tropics by the white races; nor has its injurious
influence been confined to the deaths that it causes, for these gaps in
the fighting line might be filled by fresh levies drawn from the
wholesome North. Its fearfully depressing and degenerating effects upon
even those who recover from its attacks have been still more injurious.
It has been held by careful students of tropical disease and conditions
that no small part of that singular apathy and indifference which steal
over the mind and body of the white colonist in the tropics, numbing
even his moral sense, and alternating with furious outbursts of what the
French have termed "tropical wrath," characterized by unnatural cruelty
and abnormal disregard for the rights of others, is the deadly w