to meet those dangers and to protect ourselves. Thus a
vast number of persons were crowded together within the walls of the
City. The streets were all narrow: the houses were generally of three or
more stories, built out in front so as to obstruct the light and air;
there were many courts, in which the houses were mere hovels: there was
no drainage: refuse of all kinds lay about the streets: everything that
was required for the daily life was made in the City, which added a
thousand noisome smells and noxious refuse. Then the Plague came and
carried off its thousands and disappeared. Then the survivors went on
their usual course. Nothing was changed. Yet the Plague was a voice
which spoke loudly. It said 'Clean yourselves: cease to defile the soil
of the City with your decaying matter: build your houses in wider
streets: do not shut out the sunshine--which is a splendid purifier--or
light and air. Keep yourselves clean--body and raiment, and house and
street.' The voice spoke, but no one heard. Then came the Plague again.
Still no one heard the voice. It came again and again. It came in 1500,
in 1525, in 1543, in 1563, in 1569, in 1574, in 1592, in 1603 (when
30,575 died), in 1625 (when 35,470 died), in 1635 (when 10,400 died),
and lastly, in 1665. And in all that time no one understood that voice,
and the City was never cleansed. All that was done was to light bonfires
in the street in order to increase the circulation of the air. After the
last, and worst attack, in 1666 the City was burned, and in the
purification of the flames it emerged clean, and the Plague has never
since appeared. The same voice speaks to mankind still in every
visitation of every new pestilence. It used to cry aloud in time of
Plague: it cries aloud now in time of typhoid, diphtheria, and cholera.
Diseases spring from ignorance and from vice. Physicians cannot cure
them: but they can learn their cause and they can prevent.

The Plague of 1665 began in the autumn of the year before. It had been
raging in Amsterdam and Hamburg in 1663. Precautions were taken to keep
it out by stopping the importation of goods from these towns. But these
proved ineffectual. Certain bales from Holland were landed and taken to
a house in Long Acre, Drury Lane. Here they were opened by two
Frenchmen, both of whom caught the disease and died. A third Frenchman
who was seized in the same house was removed to Bearbinder Lane, St.
Swithin's Lane, where he, too, died. And