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17
Anxiously adverting to the future, and asking
what may be the onward progress of the disease, we
can appeal only to a narrow experience. Before
us lie the records of only two complete visitations
of the disease, and the commencement of this the
third. It would be a shallow philosophy that should
pretend, from two observations, to predict the
possible orbit of this obscurely wandering plague.
Yet I dare not disguise from you that such
knowledge as we have, to justify scientific anticipation,
is pregnant with threats and gloom. For—
let me remind you of the past. At each former
period of attack, the infection, after a certain course
over Continental Europe, struck upon our eastern
coast in the summer of an unforgotten year. In
the northern parts of Great Britain, so soon as it
had lit among the population, each time it burst
forth into explosive activity, and worked its full
measure of destruction without delay. More faintly
it reached the South. On each occasion, indeed, at
the close of summer, London was sensibly affected
by the disease; but, we hoped, under a milder
infliction. Here and there, within its Bills of
Mortality (as at Tooting in 1848) there was thrown
some astounding flash on a particular hot-bed of
co-operating poison; but on the whole it seemed to
the sanguine, on each occasion, that the fury of the
epidemic was expending itself in our northern
towns, and that the metropolis was to be comparatively
spared.
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