THE CHOLERA PANIC AT TOULON.
THE five thousand who left Toulon on the first clear evidence that a fatal form of cholera or choleraic fever had broken out there, may have contained many whose duty it was to fly from the infected place, and many more who would have added much more to the danger of the outbreak by remaining there than they would have added to the means of arresting its ravages by any service they could have rendered. But, on the other hand, amongst those five thousand, there must in all probability have been hundreds who, in deserting their home on the approach of cholera, acted very like the soldier who runs away in the face of the enemy. A year ago, the cholera was at Cairo and Alexandria. This year it is at Toulon. Next year, or even in a month or two more, it may be in England; and it is surely desirable for us all to consider a little beforehand, so that there may be no panics, what is the duty of the inhabitants of a place attacked by cholera, or any other really fatal epidemic. It is sometimes held that all who could not do effective work, as either doctors or nurses, will most promote the welfare of the community by taking themselves off, and so diminishing the number of possible patients. But this is certainly a thoroughly false view. In the first place, nothing does more to enlarge the surface of such epidemics than the rapid flight in all directions of people, some of whom have in all probability the seeds of the disease in them before they fly. In the next place, it is not in the least true that those who cannot work directly at the cure of disease add nothing to the power of resistance, nothing to the cheeriness and hope of those who do work directly at it. It is not at all like the case of a camp or a besieged city, where any non-combatant increases both the drain on the food of the garrison, and the num- ber of those who, while they stand in need of direct care and pro- tection, add to the confusion in case of peril by their want of discipline. In a city struck by a dangerous epidemic, there is, as a rule, no danger of failing resources at all,—rather is there apt to be a superfluity of these for the wants of the diminished population; and again, the very people who have the amplest means of escape are just those who in general could, if they stayed, find the best appliances for minimising the danger, not only for themselves, but, what is more to the point, for numbers of their poorer neighbours. If all run away who, if they stayed, could make themselves especially useful in supporting the physicians and nurses by money, by their counsels, by their help in organising relief, by their sympathy, and even by their mere society, the place attacked is deprived by their migration of all its reserve fund of life and resource.
We hold that those who live in the same community have a certain common responsibility for resisting the common dangers which threaten them, from whatever quarter they come; and that this is just as much true, if they come from the visit of disease, as if they came from the activity of political, or social, or moral dangers. If the man who deserts his own family in panic, at a time when they specially need his aid, is a con- temptible coward, so, in a less degree, the man who deserts his own county, or town, or village, at a time when it specially needs his aid, is a coward too. Of course, it is always possible to say that the danger which you cause by remaining to run the risk of contagion, is greater than any danger you can remove by your presence and presence of mind. And in a certain number of cases, in the case of sickly people especially, that is a good plea. But, as a rule, that is the plea of the man who wants an excuse for evading his duties, or else whose mind is so fascinated by the selfish horror with which he contem- plates his own danger, that he is genuinely incapable of fulfilling them. Everybody possessed of tolerable health, respectable means, and respectable judgment, who is capable at once of obeying orders and executing them with intelligence, is an infinitely greater addition to the means of fighting such an enemy as a deadly epidemic, than he is to the danger of spreading the area of the disease. And where it is so, the man who regards his duty to himself, or even to his own family, as entirely absolving him from what he owes to the community in which he resides, seems to us to be a bad citizen. For it is as much the duty of a good citizen to with- stand a panic disorganising to society which arises from disease, as it is to withstand the disorganisation to 'society which arises from a riot or a plot ; and what should we think of the citizen who carried off his family in a fright- from a town given up to disorder, when he might have helped to stem the stream of violence and to restore authority to its place ? It seems to us that the man who flies from pestilence when he could give strength and animation to those who are resisting its ravages, is just as much of a coward as the man who flies from riot when he could strengthen the cause of order. Of course, it is always easy to minimise the responsibility for these kinds of duty, and to exaggerate the responsibility you owe to your relatives for avoiding them. It is always easy to exaggerate what a man owes to his own family, and to make light of what he owes to that comparatively loosely bound society in which his lot happens for the time to be cast. It is easy to draw in strong colours what a man risks who risks making his children father- less and his wife a widow ; and in very faint colours what he risks who only takes, say, one recruit from the army of volunteers who are fighting the common enemy. But the true way of looking at matters of this kind is t) remember that the vast majority of poor citizens are compelled to run an even greater risk of leaving their children fatherless and their wives widows, because they have neither any means of escape nor such good means of resistance ; and that their risk is greatly increased by the cowardly decampment of those in a batter class of society, who have means and have a social position which enable them to fight the common enemy with some success if they remain. And there is this further to remember, that those who shrink so sensitively from leaving their children fatherless or their wives widows, that they evade their duties as citizens in order to diminish the risk, deliberately reduce their own worth as men, and, therefore, as fathers and husbands, at least as much as they reduce the risk of forfeiting their lives. A man who pre- fers clipping a coin to running a somewhat increased risk of losing it, can hardly be trusted to maintain the standard of value. And a man who thinks so much of what he owes his family that he forgets what he owes his community, will hardly contrive to be, even to his family, what his family most needs ; for it is never the man who sacrifices his community to his family who represents the domestic principle at its best, any more than it is the man who sacrifices his family to the community who represents what may be called the patriotic principle at its best. A certain strength in maintaining the balance between family ties and the larger ties of political and social life, is essential to the ideal of each. No man who thinks only of domestic ties can be the power that he might be even in domestic life; and no man who thinks only of public ties can wield the influence that he might, even in public life. It is the larger horizon of the disinterested politician which takes away from domestic life that temper of refined selfishness which sometimes overshadows it; and it is the intenser character of the domestic affections which gives to the politician that depth and passion without which his character is apt to become empty and unreal. Now, we can imagine no better test of the true balance between what is due to the family and what is due to the community, than the feeling of men, in times of pestilence, that it is shameful to flj from the post of danger simply to save themselves for the sake of those who are dearest to them. Of course, we are speaking not of exceptional cases, but of the general rule. And we say that when men are needed—as they always are needed—to help the doctors and the nurses, and the clergymen or ministers, in their campaign against disease, and in consoling the sick or dying,—to organise systematic help and to give moral support to the men and women more actively engaged,—it should be regarded as, in a degree, disgraceful to run away from the scene of peril, and to augment the peril by running away. Of course, if one could thin off temporarily the numbers of the poorest class who offer the most promising field to the epidemic, one would gladly do so. Bat what actually happens in nine cases out of ten is, that the poorest remain to catch the disease, while the well-to-do, who are not in the same peril, and who could work most usefully for the prevention as well as for the cure of disease, disappear from the scene of danger. We earnestly trust, that if we should have another serious invasion of cholera or any other epidemic in England, we shall have no panic-stricken rushes of the well-to-do from the chance of conta- gion. Such pusillanimity means the sacrifice of the great objects of life, in order to save mere life. It would be better far for a few to die in fighting the common enemy, than for the comfortable classes to desert the miserable at the very moment when they could best earn their right to a position to which too often mere good-fortune and no kind of merit has elevated them. If cholera or any other such foe should invade England, we hope it may not be found that thousands of those who are best fitted to organise the conditions of resistance are the very first to escape from the field: Let those who can be of no use, and who may add to the danger, go away by all means. Let those who can help, even though it be only by secondary means, stand to their post, as they would, if they were soldiers, stand to their guns in the field of battle.
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