The Cholera | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Michigan · Aug 29, 1865

The Cholera.

At this moment all Western Asia and Southern Europe are panic-stricken by the terror of sudden death. That strange curse, which, as the Red Death, the Black Plague, the Yellow Fever, has so often swept like a fire around the world, and in all its Protean forms is still one Pestilence, has again arisen as swift and as strong as of old. The Cholera has unexpectedly revealed itself in the East, and for the third time begins its terrible westward march.

Egypt, breeder of so many monsters, is the mother of this. Centuries of dirt and degradation have rooted the plague so firmly in Egypt, that its return every ten years is as certain as the daily rising of the sun. Nile, with his overflowing waters, cannot cleanse the land. Even the religion of Mohammed has become the protector of disease, and this year the Cholera first appeared among that immense throng of Pilgrims which annually journeys through Egypt to Mecca and Medina. These poor people live in dirt, for though the law of the Prophet requires frequent ablutions, they seem no cleaner for its observance than the Arabs in the desert, who, for want of water, perform the

sacred washings with sand.

In three days the Cholera slew four to six thousand Pilgrims in Mecca and Medina. It pursued the survivors on their homeward flight, and the stagnant canals, the crowded roads, were strewn with the dead. It caught the Egyptian Arabs in their huts of mud and straw; decimated the dirty towns and villages, and finally entered Alexandria and reigned there in triumph. In Cairo, upward of four hundred people perished in one day. Thus it ravaged Egypt till about the middle of July, when the mortality, though still great, seems to have decreased. Of its course since, we are not fully informed, but it seems to be spreading along the Mediterranean coast; it has penetrated Sicily, established itself in Constantinople, and is already so far west as Ancona, Italy.

Western Europe is alarmed, and on the defensive. But it is hard for the police of an Empire to arrest this invisible murderer, which has all the poverty, crime, filthiness and recklessness of the world for its accomplices. Eugene Sue, in his greatest novel, refers forcibly to the apparent progress of the Cholera, at the rate of a man's daily march. But it will travel faster in 1865 than it did in 1831. The Cholera is not blown about on the winds. It passes from man to man; the ship sails with it over the sea; the steam cars speed with it over the land; it crawls along the sewerage, and creeps from street to street with the beggar. It is this mode of transmission that makes its progress so difficult to stop, yet because of this it is not useless to try the effect of all sanitary precautions. If this pestilence were a poison in the air, we might abandon all hope of controlling it, and idly await, like the Mohammedan fatalist, the mysterious punishment of God. But we know, whatever be its primal cause, that it originates in countries which are the sewers of the world; that everywhere filth and foulness are its allies, and cleanliness its greatest enemy. Our duty is therefore plain. If Europe cannot stop the pestilence, and precedents give little reason to suppose it, the Cholera may be reasonably expected in America in the Autumn or Spring. New-York, with its immense foreign commerce, is not easily defended, and in its present condition cannot be. We dare not trust entirely to the quarantine; the outworks of a fort are useless, if the enemy has allies in the citadel, and the Five Points, the Shambles, and the Markets are even now ripe for the embraces of the plague. We sound no unnecessary alarm. No one can doubt that preparation is demanded, and that even if the Cholera should never come, all the elements of disease are exhaling from our gutters. The street-sweepers should not always be kept on Broadway, and the Fifth-ave.—let them go where they are imperatively needed, into Baxter-st., and Pearl-st., and all the crooked alleys of the Five Points. Make the city clean, and leave the rest to Providence. It may be well for our officials to remember that those who, from carelessness or greed, invite the Cholera, may be obliged to receive in their homes the fatal guest, as the first victim of the guillotine was—its inventor.—N. Y. Tribune.