The Canton mail. [volume] (Canton, Miss.) 18??-1882, 1876-05-13
THE PLAQUE.
The Dreadful Scourge no,c PrernIenI ia
MesopOtansia on the Increase.

A piece of intelligence which we pub
lished last week would two centurie
ago have excited greater sensation
) than the outbreak of most formidable
war, or even than the news of mos
crushing defeat. The plague, it seem
clear, is once more threatening the con
fines of Europe. The progress of tn,
pestilence last year in the valley of thu
lower Euphrates aroused some alarm
but hopes were entertained that the cpl
demic was no more than the feebi,
flicker of fame long burned low, and
according to the general belief, nov
finally extinguished. The contagion
however, some weeks ago began to
spread in Mesopotamia, and since the
beginning of March it has reached Bag
dad. The city of Caliph Haroun AL
raschid was in former days painfully
familiar with the plague, FROM which 6
visitation was expected at least once in
ten years. The epidemic of 1881 is still
remembered with terror in Bagdad, fol
in that fatal year the disease carried of
as many as four thousand victims daily
for several days in succession, and
during the month of April is computed
to have destroyed sixty thousand people,
out of a population of one hundred and
fifty thousand. But for a whole gene
ration the pestilence has been almost I'M
known even in Egypt, Syria and on the
banks of the Tigris:and Euphrates, or, if it
still lurked in eastern cities, its virulence
had apparently dwindled to the dim
NEST shadow of its ancient terrible gran
deur. The new outbreak, however, shows
much of the old and mysterious fierce
ness before which medical science for
many centuries recoiled in despair.
| There is no reason to expect that its raw
| ages 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, with little mitigation since
the time when Cairo and Constantinople
were almost annually decimated by it's
attacks. Indeed, in the Turkish and
Egyptian capitals and in the lesser towns
of the Ottoman dominions it has linger-
ed-sometimes only suspected, and some
times showing its malignancy for mo-
ment-as much as in Bagdad. Happily,
there is not the least ground for believ-
ing that the essential conditions for its
reproduction in western Europe any
longer exist. Thus we have hardly
more than scientific interest in the
movement of distant but most deadly
enemy. Italy suffered frequently and
severely in the middle ages, and two of
the most fatal epidemics of which she
was the victim have been made memora-
BILE by the genius of Boccaccio and the
polished art of Manzoni. In the seven
teenth century little been done to
exclude or bdue H. Be; forty five
epidemics in a hundred years have been
enumerated. Our own country did not
escape. Several times in the early part
of that century some Dutch vessels en-
gagged in the Levantine trade had
brought the contagion to Holland,
whence it spread to the English ports,
and again and again the infection swept
off as the popular calculation ran, full
fifth of the population of London. But
at the close of the civil war the pesti-
lence seemed to have wholly died out,
till the hot, unwholesome summer of S65,
after five years of anti-Puritan license,
Peppys writes: "This day, much against
my will, did in Drury Lane see two or
three houses marked with a red cross
upon the doors, and Lord, have mercy
upon u.s. wrote there, which was sad
sight to me, being the first of the kind
that to my remembrance 1 ever saw"
This was the beginning of the "Great
Plague" which found its historian in
Defoe. In one week seven thousand one
hundred and sixty-fve 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 sixty eight thousand |
out of a popultion of half a million. |
Since that time no general visitation OF
the plague has been know in England or |
in the neighborhood of western Europe.
Yet in 1712 it attacked Copenhagen in
1920 Marseilles, where it slew more than |
half the inhabitants; in I'LL Moscow
in 1913 Malta in 1916 Calabria; in 1918 |
Corfu, and in 1919 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. 1t appears,
that as modern life has been |
civilized, and, above all, as it has been |
the power of the plague over
the human organization has been steadily |
lessened. The plague itself is a malignant |
fever analogous to typhus, with a pecu-
liar influence over the Emphatic system;
and, as Captain Cation and DR.. Suther-
land, in their report on the sanitary con-
dition of Mediterranean stations, have
pointed out, less virulent but cognate
disease is always present in parts of
Turkey and Egypt. showing itself in
feverish symptoms, with eruptions OF
boils, and so on. The per-
sons 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.-London Times
HEBREW WOMEN.
Perhaps one of the most significant