Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/422

 even the cruel Spanish Inquisition ever inflicted. I am not romancing. I am making, I believe, no tropes or figures of speech, but talking plain facts. I could cull from history examples without number of fair cities and even provinces destroyed and blotted out, from man's ignorance or neglect of what are now the most obvious hygienic law. Turn to the history of the Middle Ages, and we find one succession of famines and pestilences, pestilences and famines, sweeping over Europe. Come down to times nearer, we find in 1656, 240,000 people were destroyed by a pestilence in Naples alone, and upwards of 400,000 perished in the Neapolitan territories, a comparatively small place. In 1663, pestilence prevailed throughout Englam, culminating in the great plague which carried off hundreds of thousands until the fire of London, by destroying the dirty, ill-drained, and badly ventilated houses, put an end to the pestilence. Now what was the state of things then existing ? The celebrated and learned Erasmus, not very long before, in a letter to a physician of Cardinal Wolsey, says of Englishmen, "There is a degree of uncleanliness and even filth "of which I could have formed no conception. The floors of the houses are commonly of clay, strewed with rushes which are occasionally removed, but underneath lies unmolested an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments of fish, spittle, excrement of dogs, cats and everything that was nasty." Was it any wonder we had pestilence and plagues ? London of the present day is most probably thirty or forty times the size it was then, containing nearly 4,000,000 of people, but it is now one of the healthiest cities of the world, and why ? simply because the people have learnt to wash, drain their houses and streets, and use comparatively pure water, for much remains to be done even now. But a wise regard for sanitation has borne ample fruit even of late years ; and great epidemics, such as at one time it was periodically visited with — and which were ascribed to the direct manifestation of divine wrath — have practically disappeared. Am I wrong in saying that a state of things very much as described by Erasmus, if not worse, obtains amongst the dwelling-places of many of your towns, and bears practically the same fruit ? Need we be astonished at our recurring epidemics of fever, dysentery and cholera ? Take this very plague cholera, with which we are so familiar, for is not India its home ? It is one of those pestilences, bred of filth and dirt, which should disappear from amongst us. Already is it beginning to shew chinks in its armour and has ceased to be the dread, mysterious, unknown, and uncon- querable enemy it was in my early days; before which man