If the United States were threatened with invasion by a foreign power,
even if we knew that the invasion would be only temporary and that
only a few thousand of our citizens would be killed, the whole country
would be aroused in an effort to prevent that invasion. If necessary,
millions of men would be drafted and trained to meet the invaders and
billions of dollars would be expended to protect those few thousand
people from the death that must otherwise overtake them. In such a
case, every real man and every real woman in the country would be doing
something to insure the defeat of that invading army. Yet such an army
is like a box of tin soldiers compared with armies that threaten us all
the time, but which cause scarcely an extra beat of the nation’s pulse.
I refer to the armies of disease. The army of bubonic plague alone, if
permitted to effect a foothold on our shores, might at any time ravage
our cities as it once ravaged the cities of Europe and Asia, leaving
scarcely enough living to bury the dead. We read in DeFoe’s “History of
the Plague” in London in 1665 of “people in the rage of their distemper
or in the torment of their swellings, which were indeed intolerable,
running out of their own government, raving and distracted, and often
times laying violent hands upon themselves, throwing themselves out of
windows, shooting themselves, mothers murdering their own children in
their lunacy.” Indeed, we do not have to go back so far to realize what
the plague can do. In 1905 in India alone there were 1,040,429 deaths
from this one disease.