gulations; for they certainly would convert every
house proscribed by their mark, into a den and focus of the most
concentrated pestilential contagion, ensuring fearful retribution upon
those who had thus so blindly shut them up. The mark alone, besides
being equivalent to a sentence of death upon all the inmates, would
effect all this--the sick would be left to die unassisted, unpurified,
uncleansed amidst their accumulated contagion, and the dead, as has
happened before, lie unburied or scarcely covered in, till they
putrified in pestiferous heaps. Most certainly it would be proper and
beneficial, even a duty, for all who could afford the means, and were
not detained by public duties, to fly the place, and equally proper for
the other residents who continued in health, to segregate themselves as
they best could.--Plenty of free labour amongst those who must ever work
for their daily bread, would still remain for all municipal purposes,
and these our rulers, so far from consenting thus to proscribe the sick,
should employ openly in giving them every succour and aid, under the
direction and with instructions of safety from a well arranged medical
police. It would not be difficult to show, that the mortality, during
the last great plague in London, was increased a hundred fold, by
following the very measures now recommended in these regulations; and,
that the barbarous predestinarian Turk, in the very head quarters of the
plague itself, who despises all regulation, but attends his sick friend
to the last, never yet brought down upon his country such calamitous
visitations of pestilence, as enlightened Christian nations have
inflicted upon themselves, by ill-judged laws. The Turk, to be sure, by
rejecting all precaution, and admitting, without scruple, infection into
his ports, sees Constantinople invaded by the plague every year; but,
when not preposterously interfered with, it passes away, even amongst
that wretched population, like a common epidemic, without leaving any
remarkable traces of devastation behind it: and surely to establish and
make a pest-house of the dwelling of every patient who might be
discovered or even suspected to be ill, would be most preposterous.
The writing on the wall would not be more apalling to the people, and
scarcely less fatal to the object, than the cry of mad dog in the
streets, with this difference, that when the dog was killed, the scene
would be closed, but the proscribed patient woul