Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/161

Rh and Monophysite disputes and transubstantiation controversies, we might know by this time that the repetition of the excesses of the Egyptian capital in an Egyptian climate will always provoke an Egyptian plague, and that the observance of some simple dietetic rules would insure our health against the most malignant climatic influences. Southern cities like New Orleans, Memphis, and Galveston, that consume from 500 to 5,000 barrels of pork and four times as many kegs of lager-beer and gallons of whiskey each summer day, while they confine forty or fifty per cent, of their population in stifling tenement-houses, schoolrooms, and workshops, and, instead of providing free public baths, legislate against river-bathing within their corporate limits—such cities, whether situated in the swamps, like New Orleans, or on dry hills, like Memphis, are fever-factories, and produce epidemic diseases by the use of calorific food in a sweltering climate, as systematically as the New Orleans ice-factory evolves cubes of congealed water by the evaporation of ether in and around its copper water tanks.

To our dietetic abuses and the deficient ventilation of our buildings and bodies, we can ascribe the fact that the average mortality of the half-year from June to November exceeds that of the remaining six months by twenty per cent, on the table-lands and by more than thirty per cent, along the sea-coasts of the two Caucasian continents; but this increase of the death-rate is only a small part of the sum total of our self-caused summer martyrdom. If we could weigh the nameless discomforts, the weariness, the physical and moral nausea, and the unsatisfied hunger after the life-air and freedom of the wilderness, endured by millions of factory-children, shopkeepers, and counting-house drudges, if we could weigh all their misery against the hardships of the savages and half-savage nomads, we might agree with the Benthamites, that, measured by the criterion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, modern civilization is a very indifferent success. "There is something pathetic in every suicide," says Montesquieu, "for the fact that life had become insupportable to a human being could not be more conclusively proved." But the same fact is proved by every premature death, for the destructive agencies of Nature never assert themselves till the evils of life outweigh its blessings. When Vishnu resigns his power to Shiva we may be sure that annihilation is the more merciful alternative.

A privileged small minority, some happy few among the upper ten per cent, of our city population, can celebrate the holidays of their luxurious year, when rising thermometers, dust-clouds, kitchen-fumes, woolen garments, and peppered ragouts, kindle the fires of Moloch in our veins; but what shall we do to be saved if poverty or duty prevent us to save ourselves by flight to the White Mountains? A century may pass before chemists invent the art of cooling our houses by an artificial process as cheaply and effectually as we warm them by fire,