In the history of the great calamity of Asiatic cholera in this country
in 1832, mention is made of the emigrant steamer that brought the
disease to these shores. The steamer touched at Quebec and at Montreal,
and landed passengers infected with the disease at both points. Over
this intervening distance of two hundred miles, the disease traveled
in thirty hours. Pursuing the succeeding events of this history, the
writer says:
Over this long distance, thickly inhabited on both shores of the
St. Lawrence, cholera made a single leap, without infecting a
single village or a single house between the two cities, with
the following exceptions. A man picked up a mattress thrown from
the _Voyageur_, and he and his wife died of cholera; another
man, fishing on the St. Lawrence, was requested to bury a body
from the _Voyageur_, and he and his wife and nephew died. But
more than 4,000 persons died of cholera in Montreal, and more
than an equal number in Quebec. An emigrant ship conveying the
disease had meanwhile touched at New York, and the mortality
soon reached 3,500. These figures will at least indicate the
virulence of the disease, when once originated, and the rapidity
with which it spreads.
In this account we see that every place touched by the plague-ship or
any object from it became a new center from which the disease spread.
So moral evil contaminates. Its virulency spans the centuries and
affects every son of man. (Text.)
(969)