The variety of fever known as Russian influenza has broken
out in the United States, and is almost as deadly as the cholera. In Chicago the deaths have risen to 150 a day, while 10,000 cases are reported from Pittsburg, and 2,000 from Cleveland, in Ohio. Even in New York 100 policemen are sick of the disease. We fancy, on the evidence of some recent publications, that almost all the cities of the Union are just now in a highly insanitary condition. The enormous influx of ignorant Italian and Slav immigrants causes excessive crowding, and the erection of unhealthy tenement-houses without proper means of drainage. They die like flies, but the diseases which kill them also wreak their vengeance on the native population. Some day or other, an American city stricken with a plague will lynch its Municipality, and then for a few years there will be government by Commissioners and a low death-rate. Afterwards the citizens will begin voting again, and jobbery will choke up the drains once more.
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