Rensselaer Union and Jasper Republican, Volume 8, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 May 1876 — The Plague in Europe. [ARTICLE]

The Plague in Europe.

The plague, it seems clear, is once more threatening the confines of Europe. Since the beginning of March it has reached Bagdad, in which city in 1831 it destroyed 60,000 out of 150,000 people. The new outbreak, however, shows much of the old and mysterious fierceness before which medical science fbr many centuries recoiled in despair. There is no reason to expect that its ravages will be limited to the provinces of Turkey in Asia. Both in Egypt and in European Turkey the conditions in which the plague breeds and spreads are still prevailing. Happily there is not the least ground for believing that the conditions for its reproduction in Western Europe any longer exist. Thus we have hardly more than a scientific interest in the movement of a distant, but most deadly enemy. There is not much more chance of an invasion of England by the plague than there is of the destruction of London by an earthquake like that of Lisbon. No calamity, however, in thp history of the human race has produced so crushing an effect upon the imagination as the great epidemic of the plague. In one week 1,165 persons were killed by the pestilence in London, and the entire number of deaths in the year within the bills of mortality reached the enormous total of 68,000 out of a population of 500,000. Since that time no general visitation of the plague has been known in England or in the neighboring countries of Western Europe. Yet in 1712 it attacked Copenhagen; in 1720 Marseilles, where it slew more than half the inhabitants; in 1771 Moscow; in 1813 Malta; in 1816 Calabria: in 1818 Corfu: and in 1819 there was an outbreak in Silesia. These are the chief known instances of the appearance of the plague in modern times outside the dominions of Turkey and Egypt. It appears, therefore, that as modern life has been civilized, and, above all, has been cleansed, the power of the plague over the human organization baa been steadily : The plague itseif is a malignant fever analagous to typhus, with a peculiar influence over the lymphatic system. The persons subject to this sort of distemper are weakly in constitution,dwelling in the midst of damp and dirt, and generally of gross habits of living. When the true plague, stirred in its ancient “ source and seminary,” to quote Gibbon’s phrase, in the Egyptian or Syrian cities, by some such accident as an unhealthy season, extends its infection, it Axes itself where a population shown to be prepared for its reception by the prevalence of the lesser diseases already mentioned is gathered together. Oa thewhole,-it-may besaid that in no Western cities do such favoring conditions invite its visits. Though much remains to be done in our own and neighboring countries by way of sanitary improvement, what has been done, if we cone pare the life of onr cotemporaries with that of oqr ancestors of two centuries ago, marks a surprising advance. The worst rookery in modern London could not, as a nursery for the propagation of the pestilence, be matched with the chief cities of the East. Moreover, the collapse of the nervous powers, which is the especial characteristic of this frightful malady, is favored by terror and helplessness, and an active-minded modern community, which, in the worst event, would energetically combat even the plague with all the resources of medical science, could no more be reduoed to the despair of the Oriental when he finds himself face to face with the contagion than it could be terrified, as tbe people of London were in 1665, by the ominous flaming of an unexpected comet in the sky. Thus in modern England—indeed, throughout Western Europe generally—neither the material nor the moral conditions exist wihich invite the inroads of the plagu e.—Lond&n Timet.

Matrimony is on the decline In Maryland. The Balllmo,-e Qatette notes with sadness tbe fact that tbe past quarter shows a record of only 066 marriage licenses issued in the city, while tbe corresponding record oflast year showed a total of 590. A vein of silver, lead and zinc has been struck in the northern pun of Pope County, m