THE CURSE OF CIVILIZATION. 339 



tion of our system of rule over tributary states is to be 

 plainly seen in plague and famine running riot in India 

 after more than a century of British rule and nearly 

 forty years of the supreme power of the English govern- 

 ment. 1 Neither plague nor famine occurs to-day in well- 



1 The Parliamentar} 7 " Papers recently issued on the Plague in India 

 reveal an insanitary condition of Calcutta and Bombay (and no doubt 

 of most other Indian cities) which is almost incredible; yet we may 

 be sure that it does not err on the side of exaggeration, because it 

 makes known such an utter disregard for the well-being of the 

 Indian peoples, while taxing them to the verge of starvation, as to 

 be nothing less than criminal. These Papers, and the discussion on 

 the Plague in Bombay at the Society of Arts, also illustrate that unre- 

 liability of interested otFicial statements which we have seen to be so 

 prominent a feature of the vaccination question. 



In January, 1897, the Indian Government sent the Director-Gen- 

 eral of the Indian Medical Service, Dr. Cleghorn, to Bombay, to 

 examine personally into the conditions that led to the outbreak and 

 to recommend the best measures for dealing with it. He made " a 

 thorough investigation of the infected quarters," and this is what lie 

 states: About seventy per cent, of the whole native population 

 (about 800,000) live in " chawls " or tenement-houses of various sizes, 

 the largest being six or seven stories high and holding from 500 to 

 1000 people each. They consist, on each floor, of a long corridor, 

 witli small rooms on each side about 8 feet by 12 feet, each room in- 

 habited by a family, often of 5 or 6 persons. The sanitary arrange- 

 ments were utterly inadequate, the consequence being that the 

 corridors, especially at the ends, became receptacles of filth of every 

 kind, and were apparently never thoroughly cleaned. But the 

 greatest evil of all was that these overcrowded tenements were 

 built side by side, often with a space of only three or four feet 

 between them, so that, even if the windows were open, in all the 

 lower floors there could be neither adequate light nor ventilation. 

 The privacy of Indian domestic life, however, forbade the opening 

 of these windows, so that practically in half at least of the 

 rooms there was neither light nor ventilation. Added to this, 

 the narrow alleys between the chawls, owing to the inadequacy of 

 other accommodation, were used as refuse pits and open sewers, 

 where filth was allowed to accumulate, so that botli inside and out- 

 side there were masses of disease-breeding matter. Even if the rooms 



