Page:Remarks on the British Quarantine Laws.djvu/38

448 never yet been witnessed on the face of the earth. Over animals, vegetables, and minerals; over manufactures, commerce, and navigation; over the lives, liberties and properties of the nation, the juntas of health, the general direction, and the minister of the home department, for the time being, would possess an unlimited, and undefined and capricious authority. They would possess the right to kill, burn and destroy, on suspicion. Precautionary measures against a chimera would thus supersede, not only the constitutional laws of the state, but even the first law of nature.

I cannot but figure to myself the surprise which Hippocrates would experience, if he could rise from the grave, in contemplating a machinery of this description, got up for the purpose of extinguishing atmospheric diseases! Would he not be apt to think, that persons, who could institute or countenance measures, so completely destitute of reason and common sense, must be much fitter for patients than for physicians?

The preceding account of the project of the commission of government, is chiefly extracted from my exposition to the Cortes on the subject of sanitary laws, section x. The following observations on the project of the code framed by the committee of public health of the Cortes of 1822, are extracted from a critique on that project, which was also presented to the Cortes, and will be found in my "Sketch of Proceedings in Spain, &c."—The commission of government, and the committee of the extraordinary Cortes of 1821, had founded their sanitary codes on the usual belief in the existence of pestilential contagion. But the committee of public health of the Cortes of 1822, feeling that contagion was losing ground, determined to take a much wider range, and to assume a much more extended object for their code of sanitary laws. That object they stated to be "to procure for the people of Spain the highest health, and for Spain the highest salubrity." But to do this "by means of a general direction, or of any other authority, would require of course, besides super-human intelligence on their part, the subjection to the will of that authority of every agent in nature, capable of acting beneficially or injuriously on the body of man, or on the surface of the soil. In order to effect these objects, it would be necessary that the three members of the general direction (this committee, in their project, reduced the original number nine to three) should be endowed both with complete knowledge of, and complete power over, all the elements of matter—all the operations of mind—all remedies—food of every quality—drink of every species—exercise of every kind—all institutions public and private, even that of matrimony itself—arts—commerce—manufactures—navigation