1831.] AJairs in General. 311 



wrong and public shame. But the only healing and vigorous application 

 must be found in our returning, man by man, to the honest humanity 

 and generous good sense of our forefathers. We must introduce into 

 our expenditure that true economy which does nothing for ostentation, 

 and does all things with a regard to the welfare of our fellow-men. It 

 is the guilty vanity of the time which has done three-fourths of the 

 mischief. The squire must have his claret and champagne, his livery 

 servants and his coach, like the duke ; the farmer must have his dressy 

 daughters, his hunters, and his pipe of port, like the squire ; so it goes 

 down through all the gradations of society to the miserable labourer, the 

 sei'f, who sustains all, works for all, and starves for all. But common 

 feeling revolts against this waste ; common sense shews the folly of 

 thinking that wealth can be safe when the boundless majority see it 

 without the hope to share it, but by violence ; and Christianity, highest 

 and wisest guide of all, declares in its strongest tone, that he who forgets 

 in man that he is more than a mass of sinews and bones to do the work 

 of a master, that he is gifted with the title of a common nature, and an 

 equal rank in the eye of Heaven, with a right to all the enjoyment 

 compatible with his condition here, and to all the hopes bound up in 

 immortality ; shall be, sooner or later, the victim of his own faithlessness, 

 hard-heartedness, and folly. 



We were weary of the cholera from the first month, but the subject 

 is now coming on us in a fatal shape, under the disguise of pamphlets, 

 boundless in point of number, and prosy to the very verge of dis- 

 solution. Whether it will ever come to England is the question We 

 ask in explanation, where has it been ? Only in the filthiest and the 

 worst fed countries of Europe, and in the worst fed, laziest, and most 

 habitually diseased countries of Asia. What is Russia but a human 

 dung-hill, saturated with train-oil ? What is Poland but a lazar-house, 

 proverbial for every disease that the concentration of dirt, indolence 

 and beggary can engender .'' What is the whole extent of the Russian 

 Asiatic provinces, but a sweep of perpetual contagion .'' The distinction 

 between the European and Indian cholera is thus obviously accounted 

 for. The Indian is in the air — the European in the apparel — the breath 

 • — the body. The Indian comes with the burning sun of summer, 

 wastes the little blood and bone of the rice-eaters, and kills this meagre 

 population like flies. Not one European, who takes common care of 

 himself, dies, out of a thousand. It is true, the gallant dragoon who 

 drinks his couple of bottles a day, whether of stout port, or gay claret, 

 who eats as much roast beef at the mess, as if he were " a captain bold in 

 Halifax, put up in country quarters ;" or the bluff subaltern of infantry, 

 flushed with his daily four meals, his extra rations, his dozen of Hodg- 

 son's pale ale, between the hours of ten in the morning and ten at night, 

 and his final half-pint of pure IMauritius brandy, as a cooler — will be 

 occasionally in danger of a " touch of the liver," which goes into the 

 general account of cholera. But the meagre Indian, the sickly native, 

 is the true subject, and he dies of the air. A movement of a mile to the 

 left or the right, a march up a hill or across a rivulet, makes aU the 

 difference between health and massacre. 



But tl)e European cholera, let it originate where it will, being kept 

 alive l)y salt-fish or starvation, by train-oil, or nakedness and misery, walks 

 over Europe, extinguishing the guiltless of a full meal in a month, or 



