THE PILGRIM PATH OF CHOLERA. 645 



What is to happen to the crowd of pilgrims who close in on the 

 spot that he has left, and who, each in turn, swallow in rapt fer- 

 vor the fetid draught in which these thousands have been 

 washed ? Can we wonder,^ then, knowing the history of the Broad 

 Street pump, that in 1866, within a few days of the ceremony, the 

 road leading from Mecca was for twelve miles thickly strewn 

 with dead bodies a holocaust to be added to the account of per- 

 verted religious rites which has already so deadly a record ? 



Gradually England is undertaking the gigantic task of not 

 only ruling India a thing to which India has been accustomed 

 for untold centuries but of reforming and remodeling her habits 

 and her customs, a thing hitherto quite unknown, untried, and 

 thought by many to be impossible. A stolid mass of conservatism 

 of habit and even of thought has to be moved, and has to be so 

 moved as not to drift into anarchy and reaction. This is a long, 

 slow, tedious process. The existence of the " endemic area," the 

 " home of cholera," depends largely on the persistence of habits 

 and modes of life which can hardly be rooted out. If they are to 

 cease, they must probably die away or be slowly crushed out 

 rather than be swiftly overturned. We may at once make up 

 our minds that if the safety of Europe can only be attained by 

 abolishing cholera in India, Europe will for long remain in dan- 

 ger. It is hard to say how long : the object of this essay is to 

 abridge the period to the utmost. To those, again, who know 

 best the condition of the towns in the south of Europe it seems an 

 almost equally far-off hope to expect them within any reasonable 

 time to reach such a condition of cleanliness and sanitary prepared- 

 ness as to be able to look calmly on the approach of the dread 

 disease. But this is a much less formidable and more hopeful task, 

 when once it is courageously and persistently faced. Are we 

 meantime to stand helpless ? Can nothing be done to stop the in- 

 fection on the way ? Not so. In the matter of ordinary travelers 

 isolation of the infected need not be insuperably difficult. The 

 individual attacked may be sent to a properly equipped hospital, 

 be surrounded by a true cordon sanitaire in the modern sense 

 not a ring of gendarmes or a circle of quarantine as of old, but an 

 area of sanitation, within which cholera can not spread. Within 

 this area the disease may expend its force with injury to no one 

 and the crisis pass without danger to the country. But the case 

 of the pilgrims is different. Fairs and pilgrimages of India differ 

 from other means of spreading the disease in this, that not only 

 do they draw people from all parts and thus increase the chances 

 of receiving the infection, but the people attend them in such 

 numbers that they support each other in carrying on their own 

 customs, the very customs which have for centuries conduced to 

 the spread of the disease in cholera's home. It is as if the fair or 



