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59
relieved them of their task, or that there rests on
them the undivided obligation of providing for the
crisis.
III. Gentlemen, in concluding this report, I will
not attempt to disguise from you that it has been
written under feelings of considerable apprehension;
and I am fully conscious that, in thus expressing
myself, I am liable to the imputation of raising
unnecessary alarm.
If the possible mischief to be wrought by epidemic
Cholera lay in some fixed inflexible fate,
whatever opinion or knowledge I might hold on the
subject of its return, silence would be better than
speech; and I could gladly refrain from vexing the
public ear by gloomy forebodings of an inevitable
future.
But from this supposition the case differs diametrically:
and the people of England are not like
timid cattle, capable, only when blindfold, of confronting
danger. It belongs to their race—it
belongs to their dignity of manhood, to take
deliberate cognisance of their foes, and not lightly
to cede the victory. A people that has fought the
greatest battles—not of arms alone, but of genius
and skilful toil, is little likely to be scared at the
necessity of meeting large danger by appropriate
devices of science. A people that has inaugurated
railways—that has spanned the Menai Strait and