FE VER-FA CTORIES. 



149 



rian and Monophysite disputes and transubstantiation controversies, we 

 might know by this time that the repetition of the excesses of the 

 Egyptian capital in an Egyptian chmate will always provoke an Egyp- 

 tian plague, and that the observance of some simple dietetic rules 

 would insure our health against the most malignant climatic influences. 

 Southern cities like New Orleans, Memphis, and Galveston, that con- 

 sume from 500 to 5,000 barrels of pork and four times as many kegs of 

 lager-beer and gallons of wliiskey each summer day, while they confine 

 forty or fifty per cent, of their population in stifling tenement-houses, 

 schoolrooms, and workshops, and, instead of providing free public 

 baths, legislate against river-bathing within their corporate limits — 

 such cities, whether situated in the swamps, like New Orleans, or 

 on dry hills, like Memphis, are fever-factories, and produce epidemic 

 diseases by the use of calorific food in a sweltering climate, as sys- 

 tematically as the New Orleans ice-factory evolves cubes of congealed 

 water by the evaporation of ether in and around its copper water- 

 tanks. 



To our dietetic abuses and the deficient ventilation of our buildings 

 and bodies^ we can ascribe the fact that the average mortality of the 

 half-year from June to November exceeds that of the remaining six 

 months by twenty per cent, on the table-lands and by more than thirty 

 per cent, along the sea-coasts of the two Caucasian continents ; but 

 this increase of the death-rate is only a small part of the sum total of 

 our self-caused summer martyrdom. If we could weigh the nameless 

 discomforts, the weariness, the physical and moral nausea, and the un- 

 satisfied hunger after the life-air and freedom of the wilderness, en- 

 dured by millions of factory-children, shopkeepers, and counting-house 

 drudges, if we could weigh all their misery against the hardships of 

 the savages and half-savage nomads, we might agree with the Bentham- 

 ites, that, measured by the criterion of the greatest happiness of the 

 greatest number, modern civilization is a very indifferent success. 

 " There is something pathetic in every suicide," says Montesquieu, 

 " for the fact that life had become insupportable to a human being 

 could not be more conclusively proved." But the same fact is proved 

 by every premature death, for the destructive agencies of Nature never 

 assert themselves till the evils of life outweigh its blessings. When 

 Vishnu resigns his power to Shiva we may be sure that annihilation is 

 the more merciful alternative. 



A privileged small minority, some happy few among the upper ten 

 per cent, of our city population, can celebrate the holidays of their 

 luxurious year, when rising thermometers, dust-clouds, kitchen-fumes, 

 woolen garments, and peppered ragouts, kindle the fires of Moloch in 

 our veins ; but what shall we do to be saved if poverty or duty prevent 

 us to save ourselves by flight to the White Mountains ? A century 

 may pass before chemists invent the art of cooling our houses by an 

 artificial process as cheaply and effectually as we warm them by fire, 



