n was of the
distemper; and the rest of the family, being then left at liberty, would
certainly spread it among others.

The methods also in private families, which would have been universally
used to have concealed the distemper and to have concealed the persons
being sick, would have been such that the distemper would sometimes have
seized a whole family before any visitors or examiners could have known
of it. On the other hand, the prodigious numbers which would have
been sick at a time would have exceeded all the capacity of public
pest-houses to receive them, or of public officers to discover and
remove them.

This was well considered in those days, and I have heard them talk of
it often. The magistrates had enough to do to bring people to submit to
having their houses shut up, and many ways they deceived the watchmen
and got out, as I have observed. But that difficulty made it apparent
that they t would have found it impracticable to have gone the other way
to work, for they could never have forced the sick people out of their
beds and out of their dwellings. It must not have been my Lord Mayor's
officers, but an army of officers, that must have attempted it; and the
people, on the other hand, would have been enraged and desperate, and
would have killed those that should have offered to have meddled with
them or with their children and relations, whatever had befallen them
for it; so that they would have made the people, who, as it was, were
in the most terrible distraction imaginable, I say, they would have
made them stark mad; whereas the magistrates found it proper on several
accounts to treat them with lenity and compassion, and not with violence
and terror, such as dragging the sick out of their houses or obliging
them to remove themselves, would have been.

This leads me again to mention the time when the plague first began;
that is to say, when it became certain that it would spread over the
whole town, when, as I have said, the better sort of people first took
the alarm and began to hurry themselves out of town. It was true, as I
observed in its place, that the throng was so great, and the coaches,
horses, waggons, and carts were so many, driving and dragging the people
away, that it looked as if all the city was running away; and had
any regulations been published that had been terrifying at that time,
especially such as would pretend to dispose of the people otherwise than
they would dispose of themse