Page:Remarks on the British Quarantine Laws.djvu/34

444 consequence of that doctrine, be to increase or to diminish the sum total of sickness, misery, and mortality, incidental to epidemic diseases; whether the immense sums annually employed for the maintenance of sanitary establishments, at home and in our colonies, be a necessary or a superfluous expenditure; and whether the perpetual restraints, vexations, and injuries, which such regulations occasion to commerce, navigation, individual intercourse, and the intercourse of nations, be the indispensable results of a salutary precaution, or the deleterious fruit of an imposture and chimera, I confess myself utterly unable to conceive, and have no inclination to conjecture. It is sufficient for me to have shown that their proceedings are, in point of fact, both extraordinary and unwarrantable.

My time, I trust, has been much better employed than in tracing historically the progress of these institutions. They originated, as I have said, in the Venetian states, in the 16th century. Other countries copied the regulations of Venice. The quarantine laws of England, of which I have above given some account, and those of Spain, of the most recent projects of which I am now going to give a short analysis, are improvements upon the ancient codes; which entirely supercedes the necessity of my giving any description of them. The systems of England and Spain (which latter, however, may now be considered as abandoned) are but the embryo errors of other nations grown to a gigantic stature; and, therefore, in their effects on public prosperity, great evils. Whoever wishes to have a more particular history of them may consult Howard's "Account of the Principal Lazarettos of Europe."

In 1821, a "Project of an original law of public health, for the Spanish Monarchy," in 207 octavo pages, was published by a commission of public health, appointed by the Spanish government, in 1820, being a collection of all the regulations on that subject that have, since the invention of pestilential contagion, been promulgated in the various countries of Christendom; it is divided into four parts.