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18
Each time, at the commencement of the new year,
our London mortality from Cholera seemed stationary
within the limit of a few hundred deaths. Each
time winter and spring allowed a long time to our
invaded City, and confirmed the omens of the
hopeful.
But each time there was disappointment. Each
time, as the warmth of summer requickened the
exterior conditions of chemical activity, the dormant
fire kindled afresh—slowly at first, but with speedy
acceleration of rate. Each time, in the few weeks
before Michaelmas—amid almost universal threatenings
of the disease, and amid such panic of death
as the metropolis had not known since the Great
Plague, there suddenly fell many thousands of the
population.
Thus then our position stands. Scientific prediction
of phenomena can arise only in the knowledge
of laws. That the phenomena of the disease,
however capricious they may seem, are obedient
to some absolute uniformity as yet beyond our ken—
are enchained by that same rigid sequence of cause
and effect which is imposed on all remaining Nature,
it would be impossible to doubt. But these conditions
are hitherto unknown to science. Hitherto
we can speak of the facts alone, with a short
empirical knowledge of their succession. Yet in
this light, such as it is, the conclusion is only too
obvious. If the disease, already notorious for a
tendency to return on its former vestiges, repeat on