274 THE FLOATING-MATTEE OF THE AIB. 



has mingled with it the special germs which produce 

 the epidemic, being thus enabled to sow pestilence and 

 death over nations and continents — consider all this, 

 and you will come with me to the conclusion that 

 all the havoc of war, ten times multiplied, would be 

 evanescent if compared with the ravages due to atmo- 

 spheric dust. 



This preventible destruction is going on to-day, and 

 it has been permitted to go on for ages, without a whis- 

 per of information regarding its cause being vouchsafed 

 to the suffering sentient world. We have been scourged 

 by invisible thongs, attacked from impenetrable ambus- 

 cades, and it is only to-day that the light of science is 

 being let in upon the murderous dominion of our foes. 

 Facts like these excite in me the thought that the rule 

 and governance of this universe are different from what 

 we in our youth supposed them to be — that the inscrut^ 

 able Power, at once terrible and beneficent, in whom we 

 live and move and have our being and our end, is to be 

 propitiated by means different from those usually re- 

 sorted to. The first requisite towards such propitiation 

 is knowledge ; the second is action, shaped and illumi- 

 nated by that knowledge. Of knowledge we already 

 see the dawn, which will open out by-and-by to perfect 

 day ; while the action which is to follow has its un- 

 failing source and stimulus in the moral and emotional 

 nature of man— in his desire for personal well-being, 

 in his sense of duty, in his compassionate sympathy 

 with the sufferings of his fellow-men. ' How often,' says 

 Dr. William Budd in his celebrated work on Typhoid 

 Fever, — 'How often have I seen in past days, in the 

 single narrow chamber of the day-labourer's cottage the 

 father in the cofiin, the mother in the sick-bed in mut- 

 tering delirium, and nothing to relieve the desolation 

 of the children but the devotion of some poor neigh- 



