The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1879-07-25

| home IRON voyage 10 Havana uleu OF
yellow fever in Brooklyn, or if poor
wretch is sent from pillar to post, as
| Charles Mccormick was in city in New
Jersey on the mere suspicion that he might
! have the yellow fever because he camefro
Memphis, then how grand and noble are the
heroism and generosity of the people in the
subtropical cities not remote from that seat
of pestilence who have opened their doors
to the stampeded population!
Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati, st.
Louis all cities within the yellow fever
zone-and cities situated with regard to
water courses and drainage substantially
as Memphis is, have quietly opened the
doors and made room for the fugitlves,
with an easy, semi-heroic faith in the con-
ditions which for the moment insured their
safety; yet at tar greater distance from
the pestilential centre, and in conditions
where the yellow fever would be but little
more likely to spread than the Narrows to
freeze over, it seems impossible to inspire
people with that confidence in their
safety. In the little towns very near
to Memphis they have shut their doors
in modern life that awakens more vivid
picture of the primitive barbarism of human
relations than the stories that come to us
now and then in these histories of epidem-
les of some distressed wanderers-father,
mother, children-fugitives from the pesti-
lence, repulsed at every door as if they
were SO many angels of death, and thrust
4 e h.,+ a Irt1 !, n from,
the fever, perhaps, as from hunger, privation
and the exhaustion of fatigue and fear.
The Sioux themselves are not so savage as is
the panic-stricken cowardice of an ignorant
village population in Christian country.
Even if there were danger, the fears Of the
small towns near by which quarantine
against Memphis would be less disgrace
full, though fear is not often respectable;
but the inference from the facts actually
known is that there is no danger, tor the
experience of the summer appears to be that
for person to be gravely or fatally affected
with yellow fever this year in that region he
must actually dwell in Memphis, or have
been dweller there for the summer
months. If one goes away i'll and dies he
the disease does not spread from his per-
son, but ends with him. And this is
so marked that the most ignorant people
Of the country towns should have noticed
it before this. And the reason is plain. It
is not yellow fever year in the sense in
which last year was. At the present time,
however it may prove to be later in the
~, raf ind in
the air of every place the conditions that
make it active and cause it to spread.
Memphis is absolutely exceptional in this
respect. 1t was poisoned last year with
peculiar thoroughness. 1t was saturated.
Abandoned to the worst cases toward the
end of the epidemic, whole families as
well as individuals died in their apart
ments, and even rotted there before they
were discovered, and those very apartments
are inhabited now. Have they ever been
cleaned We know positively that they
have not been satisfactorily disinfected.
This is the reason why Memphis has the
fever, and other places that had it last year
are safe now, and why they should have no
fear of it.
the disease appears to be well nigh stamped
out, and will be effectively SO little later
for mere want of material to feed upon. All
that part of the population commonly called
"the better classes has left. Everybody
that had friends elsewhere to welcome them
or money with which to 60 to q distant
place and live upon until they could make
tor fbair oil hot
part of the people possessed of energy, in
telligence, means and morale, and not ''pro-
tected" by having previously had the
disease-has spread itself out in the
towns and cities all over the coun-
try and no evil consequences will
follow if the people who have thus
gone out will make reasonable provision,
as the thermometer gets higher and higher,
for the destruction of tho clothes they wore
or carried with them or for other points in
voved in proper disin lection. But Mem
phis will also be stripped of population
further down than this voluntary migration
would carry the process; for camps are to
be made out of town for the accomm odation
of those too poor to get away by their own
exertions. No one need stay in the city,
consequently, and no one will stay, save
those who have had the fever and feel them
selves safe on that account, though that
safety is not absolute These, and the col
lection of human vultures that seem to
make themselves at home in places which
all pleasant specimens of humanity leave,
| will be the only Inhabitants of Memphis in
a faxv DAVIS and tho svmpathies of the
nation at large need not be racked over
what the disease will do with these
But the systematic disinfection of that
city which will have to be undertaken when
the cold weather comes again can scarcely
be left with safety to the Memphis people,
and the State authorities will have tn ron.