Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/480

Rh the tree that can kill malaria in such a morass can drive it out of the human blood.

What reason is there to believe that malaria would follow if a remedial and sanative, rather than a destructive and mephitic course were adopted?

But who are "they" who thus have the doing or undoing of the swamp in their hands?

"They" are the people who devised the policy of the Dismal Swamp Canal and the Land Company or Timber Company, and all who support their past and present management. "They," too, are the farmers of the swamp district who do not agitate for the removal of the obstructions to their prosperity offered by those persons or corporations. "They," too, are the whole people of Virginia and North Carolina who tolerate in their States an evil that the early eighteenth century resolved to remove, and that is a double discredit to the nineteenth century.

The Dismal Swamp Canal was chartered in 1787 as a public highway, to be forever free from taxes on condition that it served certain important purposes, one of which was that "as the said canals, the main canal and feeder, may be of great utility in affording the means of draining the sunken lands through which they pass ... it