The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1873-09-18


Italian alliance would make France tame and
quietly submissive. In 1915 and in 1922 the
power was at Vienna. Now the power is at
Berlin.
The Cholera and tho Yellow Fever
I'm the Southwest.
The movements Of the cholera in the Mis-
sissippi Valley during the past summer, but
more particularly in the section south OF the
Ohio River, have been very eccentric and re-
markable Touching lightly at New Orleans,
this pestilence passed up the Mississippi, and
first assumed the form Of virulent epidemic
at Memphis, and next at Nashville, from which
two cities, after gathering fearful harvest for
death in each, it radiated to various points in
the surrounding country. The line Of travel
upon which it appears to have been most fatal
was the railway line into East Tennessee, and
in the villages of that mountainous country.
famous as one of the most salubrious regions
Of the United States, the ravages of the disease
were such as to create q general panic among
the inhabitants
Throughout the West, in Short while such
large cities as Cincinnati, Louisville, st. Louis
and Chicago, in this last seasons return of the
cholera, have hardly felt its presence, small
villages and settlements hitherto exempt
have been decimated by the disease and almost
depopulated by the stampede of the citizens
not stricken down. The same extraordinary
exemption of great cities and the same fatality
in out-of-the-way towns and villages has
marked the eccentric outbreaks of the
cholera this year in Europe We conclude
that science and sanitary precautions in large
cities in both hemispheres have mastered the
disease and driven it to those interior places
where ignorance as to the treatment required
and general disregard of sanitary measures
have furnished the materials upon which the
pestilence feeds and Is propagated. So well
fear an appreciable interruption of the bust
ness affairs Of this great and crowded city
should the cholera visit u.s. provided always
that our responsible health authorities are up
to the full measure Of their duties in the need
full sanitary safeguards.
The same precautions will equally apply
to the yellow fever. 1t is given out that the
outbreak of this disease in Shreveport, La,
which has, we may say, reduced tho popula-
ton of that town to the sick and their nurses,
and the hearse drivers and grave dggers, was
caused by leaving the carcasses of lot of
drowned cattle near the town to tester in the
sun and poison the air. The condition Of the
town itself was doubtless filthy and redolent
of noxious exhalations from stagnant water
and decaying animal and vegetable refuse
when the fever broke out, as was Norfolk, Va,
some eighteen or twenty years ago, when the
yellow fever was so fearfully fatal there as to
make that disastrous visitation subject for
general relief movements throughout the coun-
try New Orleans, before the thorough clean
ing up and draining of the city enforced by
General Butler in his military occupation, was
almost every year subject to depressing
season Of yellow fever; but since the war and
from the following of the good example set by
General Butler New Orleans has been COM
paratively exempt from the ravages of yellow
Jack" We believe, too, that the terrible
mortality so frequently inflicted upon the
cities of Asia, Northern Africa and Southern
Europe from cholera and other epidemics has
been mainly caused by the abominably filthy
condition of those cities.
To the same cause may be charged the de-
struction Of Life by the cholera in Memphis
and Nashville during the past summer, and to
the same cause is mainly due the presence Of
yellow fever in Memphis at this time. Much
Of the fllthiness and neglect of sanitary duties
in those cities and in most of the cities and
towns of our Southern States is chargeable to
the black population, which, since the war,
has generally drifted from the rural districts
to the towns and cities. These black colonists,
poor, idle, shlftless, ignorant and super
stitious, crowded in malarious holes and corners,
have, doubtless, contributed in an unusual
degree to the spread of the cholera this year
In the Southwest; for the death records of
Memphis and Nashville show that the ravaees
of the cholera were most terrible among those
pestilential settlements of the careless and
ignorant blacks. Hero is field for reform
and reconstruction, in which Southern and
Northern philanthropists may labor to some
purpose.
The yellow fever appears to be extending
northward from the Red River being reported
at Little Rock, on the Arkansas. As it disap-
pears, however, with the first FROST with the
more common summer malarial fevers of the
South, and as the first frosts of autumn have
already appeared In the North, We are en-
couraged to believe that few days or q few
weeks hence the first frost will put an end to
yellow jack" even in Louisiana, for this
year. Meantime we are absolutely secure
against the cholera or the yellow fever in New
York only in maintaining a proper attention
to sanitary precautions on the land and the
water.
NNETY-sU MILLION BUSHELS OF WHEAT, the
Mark Lane Express says, will be required by