NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THANKSGIVING for the departure of the cholera is not open to the objections urged against prayers to deprecate it. The quar- terly report just issued by the Registrar-General throws, not a new, but a fuller and stronger light on the truth of this matter. The visitation has been terrible : it has swelled the number of deaths to a greater amount than the register had yet recorded ; with the attendant emigration, it has for the first time this many a year caused the population to diminish in numbers. But the review of the whole cholera campaign confirms the opinion, that the virulence of the disease depends in the first instance on the nature of the site and the local atmosphere, and ultimately on the degree of care and skill devoted to improve the sanatory state of the site and atmosphere. Places eminently favoured in those respects by nature, or diligently improved by the skill and labour of man, were exempt, or lightly visited. In other words, where man learned his lesson from the laws of nature, and car- ried them out, he earned the happy results which attend a fulfil- ment of those beneficent laws : where he neglected to improve the natural site according to the laws of his own wellbeing, or where, as in many cases it has been, be violated those laws, the scourge smote him severely. To deprecate that scourge, as a popular preacher said, was to repine against " the laws of nature and of the God of nature" : to rejoice when the fulfilment of those laws has chastized and purified the race, and our suffering is over, is a pious emotion of gratitude. j
But, it has been justly said, we slight the dictates of the Divine laws if we neglect the lesson that we have received, and still de- fer putting our house in order. Mr. Simon, the City Health Officer, enumerates a list of things to be done for the decent and healthful ordering of the Metropolis, which is formidable only to them of little faith and feeble purpose. Journals echo his recom- mendations with an unanimity and a copiousness that might make us believe a vast and blessed change to be at hand. But in this matter of writing, the public sanatory officers and the journalists have it all their own way ; on paper there is no ad- versary. At public meetings, " resolutions," for instance in fa- vour of an abundant supply of good water, pass without dissent. But we see no signs of organization or effective action : on the contrary, when it comes to doing anything, then the resistance begins,—as we saw in the vexatious and persevering obstruction to the most reasonable orders against overcrowding burial-grounds ; in the determined obstruction against that house-to-house visita- tion which was the sole check to the acute visitation of cholera ; and still see in the corporate resolve to maintain the filthy nuisance, gigantic and beastly, of Smithfield Market. Supreme government only can effectually cope with the enterprise.
