PLAGUE IN IKDIA. 3'6b 



Surat. The next outbreak in India fell to be described by three 

 British writers. It happened in Cutch and Kathiawar from 1815 

 to 1821, in peculiar circumstances of aggravation within walled 

 towns, arising out of famine and the mode of collecting the tribute 

 from the recalcitrant petty chieftains of those territories by the 

 army of the Gaekwar. and it came to an end almost coincidently 

 with the new order of things in 1821. The only other epidemic be- 

 fore the present was also a limited one, in Marwar, especially in the 

 town of Pali, which lasted from 1830) to 1839, and may have been a 

 revival of plague which is said to have been indigenous in jNIarwar 

 •' from a remote period." 



Turning from those Indian precedents to the much more continu- 

 ous and extensive plagues of P^urope, we find an uninterrupted his- 

 tory in one country or another and in one city or another for more 

 than three hundred years — from the year 1347 to the latter half of 

 the seventeenth century, when the infection disa})peared almost 

 simultaneously from all the countries of western Europe. The chief 

 difference between the European plague period and the one which is 

 now running its course in India is that the former did not involve 

 the villages, but only the towns, except in its first great wave, from 

 1347 to 1350, which swamped country and town alike with an almost 

 unheard-of mortality, and excepting, perhaps, two or three general 

 but minor revivals at intervals in the latter half of the fourteenth 

 century; for the rest, it continued an infection of the towns, and in 

 these it commonly broke out at long intervals — twenty or forty 

 years — excepting in such capitals as London, where it was seldom 

 dormant for a series of years until it was about to cease altogether. 



It is not surprising that plague in India should be chiefly an affair 

 of the villages, because that has been also the experience with chol- 

 era. So much w^as that a village infection that Anglo-Indian writers 

 who were at home when cholera reached this country in 1831 prophe- 

 sied that it would fall most upon the enormously congested rural 

 population of Ireland. But it spared the Irish villages and ham- 

 lets almost absolutely, although it attacked the Irish cities severely. 

 European precedents being thus inapplicable to India as to villages, 

 we are thrown back upon the lessons that may be learned from the 

 history of plague in India itself during the last nine years. It is 

 only from the Bombay Presidency that we have data minute enough 

 to be of nnich use, from which it appears that the huge totals of 

 plague deaths year after year are not so hopeless as they look. When 

 they are analyzed — and it is no small labor to analyze them — it is 

 found that the aggregate of each year has been made up by items 

 from somewhat different places. The cities of Bombay, l^oona. and 

 Karachi have been steadv, but in the mofussil all the districts hav(> 



