Page:Remarks on the British Quarantine Laws.djvu/31

27] to have recommended the abolition of sanitary restrictions in this country?

Thus, then, it is evident, in direct contradiction to the terms of their report, not only that the nature and application of the quarantine regulations did "fall within the scope of inquiry," to which the Committee must have been directed; but that they constituted precisely what ought to have been its principal object. Considered in a view to legislation, it is self-evident that the proof of the existence or non-existence of contagion, in the plague, can be no otherwise of consequence than as it regards sanitary regulations. No inquiry into the validity of that doctrine could, upon any other principle, have any result. And such seems to be the impression on the mind of the Committee, when, in the very same sentence in which they make the surprising declaration upon which I have been commenting, they go out of their way to express their unqualified approbation of the regulations, of which they had just declared that "the nature and application did not fall within the scope of inquiry to which they had been directed;" "but they see no reason to question the validity of the principles upon which such regulations appear to have been adopted."

I shall now show, that, instead of this unqualified approbation, which, according to their own principles, the Committee were not justified in pronouncing, they were bound, according to the facts which were elicited in the course of the investigation, to have recommended the abolition of quarantine regulations in this country, as far as regards the intercourse with the Levant, even upon the supposition of the existence of contagion in the plague.

By the uniform silence of history, in that case forming the best evidence; by the testimony of almost all the witnesses examined before the Committee; and even by official custom-house returns, it stands confirmed, that, in the memory of man, not a single person has ever arrived in this country laboring under the plague, and that not a single case of that disease has occurred amongst the expurgators of goods in the Lazarettos. The Levant Company, in their printed orders to their factories abroad, assert that the plague was never brought to England by means of their commerce. Sir James Porter (Observations on the Turks, p. 41.) goes farther. He asserts that the plague was never brought to these kingdoms immediately from Turkey, without limitation to the Levant Company's establishments. This was also confirmed, and brought down to the year 1819, by official custom-house returns from the different outports, published in the Appendix to the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, dated July 4, 1819, of which the following are extracts:. There is not any record of a case of absolute plague