Page:Doom of the Great City - Hay - 1880.djvu/35

 obtain tidings of him. From him we gained the first startling piece of intelligence. This gentleman had seen the “special edition” of an evening paper the previous night, and in it, he said, was an account of the accident in Bermondsey. The report said that over five hundred lives were certainly lost, but that, owing to the dense fog in the locality, and the difficulty of getting men to enter it, the exact total could not yet be known. It went on to add that although people in the adjacent district asserted the cause of the calamity to have been simply a sudden and overwhelming access of fog, this could not have been the true reason, because it was contrary to all previous experience; “wherefore,” said this sapient journal, “we must suppose that a gush of foul sewer-gas, or some similar poisoning of the thick and heavy air, produced the fatal effect;” a piece of reasoning which almost moved Wilton to laughter. This is a fair illustration of how strangely fixed in the London mind was the notion that their fog was always to be, what it always had been, innocuous to the generality of people—an idea which had served to prevent any steps being taken in the direction of rendering it really so. Now, as we had seen reason to admit the possibility of the mere fog acting as a direct destroyer, we were sadly disheartened by this confirmation of the evil news. It is easy now to follow the train of conclusions which made our vague anxieties assume a more vivid shape.

Firstly, supposing it proved that the fog could kill an individual—and Wilton had proved that—what was to hinder its killing a number of individuals in a certain spot? and that was now proved to our minds. Again, if the fog could attain to such virulence over any special locality, there was no just reason for supposing that its