THE INDIAN SALT-TAX REVENGED.
AN ingenious writer has pointed out a series of coincidences which ought to strike alarm into the heart of the great official palace in Leadenhall Street ; for if the facts are not merely "pretty to observe" as coincidences, they indicate an awful re- tribution for bad economics. The case stands thus. The ex- citing cause of Asiatic cholera is a poison conveyed in the at- mosphere. The method of the disease seems to consist in the death of the circulating system for want of the salt ingredient in the blood. According to Liebig, salt is necessary to combine with the oxygen of the atmosphere in order to carry off the car- bonic acid of the blood. People living on inland vegetation do not find in their ordinary food enough of the chloride of sodium, and are fain therefore to seek it in the form of common salt. The inhabitants of India are a race living on inland vegetation ; but their supply of salt is kept down by the exorbitant tax, inso- much that they are obliged to put up with a minimum. In that country the cholera is engendered ; and from that distant region, "le. dal Gauge," the pest-cloud marches slowly across Asia, across Europe, to visit the lordly Directors where they sit ; it comes to confute with sickly horrors the special-pleading of that Thomas Love Peacock who tried to vindicate the taxed and dirt- adulterated salt of India by its coloured likeness to the salt of Paris. The Indians might address the Directors in the words of the chorus stricken with terror for the retribution that comes upon the Assyrian Queen-
" Ah ! sconvolta ordine eterno E nature in at orribile giorno I Name irate dischinde r averno, Sorgon ombre dal nero soggiomo.
hfinacciosa erra morte d' intorno L'alme ingombra d'angoacie, d'orror."
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