Page:Remarks on the British Quarantine Laws.djvu/37

33] of infected communities:' the means, air, fire, gases, water, and other fluids.

Title 6, in 53 articles, contains 'precautions for keeping communities in health free from the contagion of the infected:'—precautions ten thousand times worse than any possible contagion.

Title 7, in 32 articles, treats of expenditure.

Title 8, in 37 articles, treats 'of the penalties to be inflicted on the violators of the terrestrial sanitary service:' fines—dismissal from employment—imprisonment—death!

The fourth part treats of the public health, or 'rules and precautions of sanitary policy in all the communities of the Spanish monarchy.' Title 1, 'Its objects and first care.' The projectors here manifest a disposition to extend their care to the regulation of matrimony, and of other public institutions. This head is again divided into urban and rural sanitary police. Title 2, in 47 articles, amonstamongst [sic] other things, takes cognizance of manufactories. Title 3, in 12 articles, takes cognizance of canals, roads, trees, vegetables, animals, and in general all subjects of rural economy. Title 4, in 17 articles, treats of the 'means of averting endemic and epidemic infirmities, and of preventing the propagation of regular and hereditary contagions!' I must restrain myself from the train of observations to which this very curious title would naturally give rise, or commenting on the nature of the multifarious and delicate functions which it would confer on the general directors.

Title 5, in 36 articles, lays down 'politico-medical rules for the exercise of the art of curing.' It seems difficult to divine the connexion of this title with sanitary regulations. But nothing, it seems, is too great, or too minute for the grasp of the commission. Here they claim authority over every department of medicine.

We now come to the animal creation. Title 6, in 31 articles, contains 'precautions for preventing the communication, propagation, and re-production of the epizooties or epidemics of animals' They too, it seems, are contagious: and rules similar in principle are to be applied to them, as in the case of the human species!

Title 7, in 5 articles, treats 'of the authority of municipalities over the health police of communities, and of the jurisdiction of the municipal and provincial juntas, and of the general direction of the public health of the Kingdom." Every thing centres in the general direction, under the authority of the government. The nine gentlemen composing that direction would, in effect, have an unlimited authority—an unqualified arbitrary power—over the lives and properties of the people. Such an instrument of systematic despotism as these sanitary laws would afford, has perhaps