Rensselaer Union and Jasper Republican, Volume 8, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 June 1876 — The Plague. [ARTICLE]

The Plague.

The announcement that the plague is likely to make another circuit of theglobe, front east to west, ought to be accepted as a very useful warning, but ought not to create any great alarm. It would perhaps be too much to say that the destructive power of the plague corresponds exactly with the degree ot panic which it creates, but it is certain that at all times the plague has been fed by the panic. The fact that in our time we are not likely to be much affrighted is one of the best seen, Titles that The enemy; if he should come among us, will not come with anything like its old vigor or destructiveness. Within the last quarter of a century there have been two or three alarms of plague, but the prompt measures that were taken to prepare against the coming ot the old intruder, and the comparative calmness with which people generally waited its coming, seem to have prevented the march of the malady westward. This time, indeed, some of the highest medical authorities of the European continent appear to be under the impression that the recent freedom which the West has enjoyed from any serious spread of the plague | maybe only like the lull before the storm, and that the disease may be about to enter a new period of activity. Of course, we cannot hope that the World, Or even the Western world, is yet endowed with immunity against the ravages of this ancient enemy. -Maladies retain the integrity of their type as they are handed down ' from one civilization to another. Few j are actually lost, few spring forth as absolutely new. Ague is as'comparatively I rare as it once was general, and it is a j thing to be thankful for that the “ sweat- ! ing sickness’’ has not been epidemic since i 1531. The black death, which destroyed so many pieople in England in the reign I of Edward 111, that the price of labor rose and strikes were invented, still exists in

' the shape of malignant typhus, also known in America. Again, the great i plague of Athens—as fortunate in finding ! Thucydides to chronicle it as the Floren- , tine plague was in giving that stimulus to the imagination of Boccaccio which the London- plague- supplied “Defoe —was merely a terrible visitation of what we ct 11 malignant scarlet fever. Small-pox is just what it was in the sixth century, when once it gets its head; and the great plague of A. 15. 543, which some persons , aUiibuud .to . the . lively inveutton of, the historian Procopius, has made its appearance again as cerebrospinal meningitis. The most striking i fact about most of these diseases is their I comparative mildness in modern times. Is their force exhausted as the world grows older, and they age with it, or has modern sanitary science robbed them of their sting and ot their victory? In the case of small pox, of course, we know how the plague was stayed by vaccination, and we may plausibly attribute the decline of contagious mental fevers, like the madness Of the Flagellants, the disorder of the Dancers, and so on, to all the condi- . lions of modern life, which break up j every sort of moral contagion, every kind lof enthusiasm propagated by the presi encc ot multitudes of-p-eople. Mean- ' while the overcrowding in great cities, i bad drainage, defective water supply and , a want ot proper precautions with regard to infectious diseases still lead to evils from which every one must sutler, either !in health or in purse. We may have banished the frightful diseases which at /one time swept away half the population of a country, but if they- no longer afflict us fever is still destroying large numbers; i small-pox has of late years proved,T>y I terrible evidence, that its power is not ex- ' tinct; and the occasional visitations ot ] cholera show how much has still to be accomplished by the sanitary reformers. Plague is, we presume, dirt to begin with, before ft assumes the form of putrid fever or any such loathsome shape. The scourge has always come from the East, because those communities have usually abounded in peculiar forms of dirt, preserved and diffused through the medium j of garments that are the heirlooms of geni erations. During the last two years the ! plague has approached again, as described by Lupretius some two thousand years ago, along the lower Euphrates, and at last accounts it was exciting alarm at Constantinople. Should the disease really spread further West it will be met, we presume, composedly. People will no longer lose their heads. Governments now know what to do, and every precaution will be taken and every enlightened system of defense will be put in operation. Civilization has had hard lessons of experience in the way of dealing with disease, but it has learned them, we trust, at last. In a sense ditierent from that in [ which Timon used the words: “ What is amiss plague and infection mend,” or have mended by compelling us to find out the true'way of dealing with them.—Chicapo Inter-Ucean.