"My friend," he resumed, in a milder tone, but with a melancholy manner,
"your own individual health and happiness are scarcely more precarious
than this fancied security. By the mercy of God, twice during the short
space of your life, England has been spared from the horrors of invasion,
which might with ease have been effected during the American war, when
the enemy's fleet swept the Channel, and insulted your very ports, and
which was more than once seriously intended during the late long contest.
The invaders would indeed have found their graves in that soil which they
came to subdue: but before they could have been overcome, the atrocious
threat of Buonaparte's general might have been in great part realised,
that though he could not answer for effecting the conquest of England, he
would engage to destroy its prosperity for a century to come. You have
been spared from that chastisement. You have escaped also from the
imminent danger of peace with a military tyrant, which would inevitably
have led to invasion, when he should have been ready to undertake and
accomplish that great object of his ambition, and you must have been
least prepared and least able to resist him. But if the seeds of civil
war should at this time be quickening among you--if your soil is
everywhere sown with the dragon's teeth, and the fatal crop be at this
hour ready to spring up--the impending evil will be a hundredfold more
terrible than those which have been averted; and you will have cause to
perceive and acknowledge, that the wrath has been suspended only that it
may fall the heavier!"
"May God avert this also!" I exclaimed.
"As for famine," he pursued, "that curse will always follow in the train
of war: and even now the public tranquillity of England is fearfully
dependent upon the seasons. And touching pestilence, you fancy
yourselves secure, because the plague has not appeared among you for the
last hundred and fifty years: a portion of time, which long as it may
seem when compared with the brief term of mortal existence, is as nothing
in the physical history of the globe. The importation of that scourge is
as possible now as it was in former times: and were it once imported, do
you suppose it would rage with less violence among the crowded population
of your metropolis, than it did before the fire, or that it would not
reach parts of the country which were never infected in any former
visitation? On the contrary, its ravages would be more general and more
tremendous, for it would inevitably be carried everywhere. Your
provincial cities have doubled and trebled in size; and in London itself,
great part of the population is as much crowded now as it was then, and
the space which is covered with houses is increased at least fourfold.
What if the sweating-sickness, emphatically called the English disease,
were to show itself again? Can any cause be assigned why it is not as
likely to break out in the nineteenth century as in the fifteenth? What
if your manufactures, according to the ominous opinion which your
greatest physiologist has expressed, were to generate for you new
physical plagues, as they have already produced a moral pestilence
unknown to all preceding ages? What if the small-pox, which you vainly
believed to be subdued, should have assumed a new and more formidable
character; and (as there seems no trifling grounds for apprehending)
instead of being protected by vaccination from its danger, you should
ascertain that inoculation itself affords no certain security?
Visitations of this kind are in the order of nature and of providence.
Physically considered, the likelihood of their recurrence becomes every
year more probable than the last; and looking to the moral government of
the world, was there ever a time when the sins of this kingdom called
more cryingly for chastisement?"
_Montesinos_.--[Greek text]!
_Sir Thomas More_.--I denounce no judgments. But I am reminding you that
there is as much cause for the prayer in your Litany against plague,
pestilence, and famine, as for that which entreats God to deliver you all
from sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion; from all false doctrine,
heresy, and schism. In this, as in all things, it behoves the Christian
to live in a humble and grateful sense of his continual dependence upon
the Almighty: not to rest in a presumptuous confidence upon the improved
state of human knowledge, or the altered course of natural visitations.
_Montesinos_.--Oh, how wholesome it is to receive instruction with a
willing and a humble mind! In attending to your discourse I feel myself
in the healthy state of a pupil, when without one hostile or contrarient
prepossession, he listens to a teacher in whom he has entire confidence.
And I feel also how much better it is that the authority of elder and
wiser intellects should pass even for more than it is worth, than that it
should be undervalued as in these days, and set at nought. When any
person boasts that he is--
"_Nullias addictus jurare in verba magistri_,"
the reason of that boast may easily be perceived; it is because he
thinks, like Jupiter, that it would be disparaging his own all-wiseness
to swear by anything but himself. But wisdom will as little enter into a
proud or a conceited mind as into a malicious one. In this sense also it
may be said, that he who humbleth himself shall be exalted.
_Sir Thomas More_.--It is not implicit assent that I require, but
reasonable conviction after calm and sufficient consideration. David was
permitted to choose between the three severest dispensations of God's
displeasure, and he made choice of pestilence as the least dreadful.
Ought a reflecting and religious man to be surprised, if some such
punishment were dispensed to this country, not less in mercy than in
judgment, as the means of averting a more terrible and abiding scourge?
An endemic malady, as destructive as the plague, has naturalised itself
among your American brethren, and in Spain. You have hitherto escaped
it, speaking with reference to secondary causes, merely because it has
not yet been imported. But any season may bring it to your own shores;
or at any hour it may appear among you homebred.
_Montesinos_.--We should have little reason, then, to boast of our
improvements in the science of medicine; for our practitioners at
Gibraltar found themselves as unable to stop its progress, or mitigate
its symptoms, as the most ignorant empirics in the peninsula.
_Sir Thomas More_.--You were at one time near enough that pestilence to
feel as if you were within its reach?
_Montesinos_.--It was in 1800, the year when it first appeared in
Andalusia. That summer I fell in at Cintra with a young German, on the
way from his own country to his brothers at Cadiz, where they were
established as merchants. Many days had not elapsed after his arrival in
that city when a ship which was consigned to their firm brought with it
the infection; and the first news which reached us of our poor
acquaintance was that the yellow fever had broken out in his brother's
house, and that he, they, and the greater part of the household, were
dead. There was every reason to fear that the pestilence would extend
into Portugal, both governments being, as usual, slow in providing any
measures of precaution, and those measures being nugatory when taken. I
was at Faro in the ensuing spring, at the house of Mr. Lempriere, the
British Consul. Inquiring of him upon the subject, the old man lifted up
his hands, and replied in a passionate manner, which I shall never
forget, "Oh, sir, we escaped by the mercy of God; only by the mercy of
God!" The governor of Algarve, even when the danger was known and
acknowledged, would not venture to prohibit the communication with Spain
till he received orders from Lisbon; and then the prohibition was so
enforced as to be useless. The crew of a boat from the infected province
were seized and marched through the country to Tavira: they were then
sent to perform quarantine upon a little insulated ground, and the guards
who were set over them, lived with them, and were regularly relieved.
When such were the precautionary measures, well indeed might it be said,
that Portugal escaped only by the mercy of God! I have often reflected
upon the little effect which this imminent danger appeared to produce
upon those persons with whom I associated. The young, with that hilarity
which belongs to thoughtless youth, used to converse about the places
whither they should retire, and the course of life and expedients to
which they should be driven in case it were necessary for them to fly
from Lisbon. A few elder and more considerate persons said little upon
the subject, but that little denoted a deep sense of the danger, and more
anxiety than they thought proper to express. The great majority seemed
to be altogether unconcerned; neither their business nor their amusements
were interrupted; they feasted, they danced, they met at the card-table
as usual; and the plague (for so it was called at that time, before its
nature was clearly understood) was as regular a topic of conversation as
the news brought by the last packet.
_Sir Thomas More_.--And what was your own state of mind?
_Montesinos_.--Very much what it has long been with regard to the moral
pestilence of this unhappy age, and the condition of this country more
especially. I saw the danger in its whole extent and relied on the mercy
of God.
_Sir Thomas More_.--In all cases that is the surest reliance: but when
human means are available, it becomes a Mahommedan rather than a
Christian to rely upon Providence or fate alone, and make no effort for
its own preservation. Individuals never fall into this error among you,
drink as deeply as they may of fatalism; that narcotic will sometimes
paralyse the moral sense, but it leaves the faculty of worldly prudence
unimpaired. Far otherwise is it with your government: for such are the
notions of liberty in England, that evils of every kind--physical, moral,
and political, are allowed their free range. As relates to infectious
diseases, for example, this kingdom is now in a less civilised state than
it was in my days, three centuries ago, when the leper was separated from
general society; and when, although the science of medicine was at once
barbarous and fantastical, the existence of pesthouses showed at least
some approaches towards a medical police.
_Montesinos_.--They order these things better in Utopia.
_Sir Thomas More_.--In this, as well as in some other points upon which
we shall touch hereafter, the difference between you and the Utopians is
as great as between the existing generation and the race by whom yonder
circle was set up. With regard to diseases and remedies in general, the
real state of the case may be consolatory, but it is not comfortable.
Great and certain progress has been made in chirurgery; and if the
improvements in the other branch of medical science have not been so
certain and so great, it is because the physician works in the dark, and
has to deal with what is hidden and mysterious. But the evils for which
these sciences are the palliatives have increased in a proportion that
heavily overweighs the benefit of improved therapeutics. For as the
intercourse between nations has become greater, the evils of one have
been communicated to another. Pigs, Spanish dollars, and Norway rats,
are not the only commodities and incommodities which have performed the
circumnavigation, and are to be found wherever European ships have
touched. Diseases also find their way from one part of the inhabited
globe to another, wherever it is possible for them to exist. The most
formidable endemic or contagious maladies in your nosology are not
indigenous; and as far as regards health therefore, the ancient Britons,
with no other remedies than their fields and woods afforded them, and no
other medical practitioners than their deceitful priests, were in a
better condition than their descendants, with all the instruction which
is derived from Sydenham and Heberden, and Hunter, and with all the
powers which chemistry has put into their hands.
_Montesinos_.--You have well said that there is nothing comfortable in
this view of the case: but what is there consolatory in it?
_Sir Thomas More_.--The consolation is upon your principle of expectant
hope. Whenever improved morals, wiser habits, more practical religion,
and more efficient institutions shall have diminished the moral and
material causes of disease, a thoroughly scientific practice, the result
of long experience and accumulated observations, will then exist, to
remedy all that is within the power of human art, and to alleviate what
is irremediable. To existing individuals this consolation is something
like the satisfaction you might feel in learning that a fine estate was
entailed upon your family at the expiration of a lease of ninety-nine
years from the present time. But I had forgotten to whom I am talking. A
poet always looks onward to some such distant inheritance. His hopes are
usually _in nubibus_, and his expectations in the _paulo post futurum_
tense.
_Montesinos_.--His state is the more gracious then because his enjoyment
is always to come. It is however a real satisfaction to me that there is
some sunshine in your prospect.
_Sir Thomas More_.--More in mine than in yours, because I command a wider
horizon: but I see also the storms which are blackening, and may close
over the sky. Our discourse began concerning that portion of the
community who form the base of the pyramid; we have unawares taken a more
general view, but it has not led us out of the way. Returning to the
most numerous class of society, it is apparent that in the particular
point of which we have been conversing, their condition is greatly
worsened: they remain liable to the same indigenous diseases as their
forefathers, and are exposed moreover to all which have been imported.
Nor will the estimate of their condition be improved upon farther
inquiry. They are worse fed than when they were hunters, fishers, and
herdsmen; their clothing and habitations are little better, and, in
comparison with those of the higher classes, immeasurably worse. Except
in the immediate vicinity of the collieries, they suffer more from cold
than when the woods and turbaries were open. They are less religious
than in the days of the Romish faith; and if we consider them in relation
to their immediate superiors, we shall find reason to confess that the
independence which has been gained since the total decay of the feudal
system, has been dearly purchased by the loss of kindly feelings and
ennobling attachments. They are less contented, and in no respect more
happy--that look implies hesitation of judgment, and an unwillingness to
be convinced. Consider the point; go to your books and your thoughts;
and when next we meet, you will feel little inclination to dispute the
irrefragable statement.