ble.

It is an indisputable fact that civilization as it progresses develops
in its advance new diseases and new catastrophes. Hay fever and la
grippe were not popular a hundred years ago. To breed a first-class
cyclone, cut down your trees and dry up your water supply. This has been
conscientiously attended to, and the natural consequences have
followed. Science can eliminate the simooms that strike Bombay and
Calcutta at such a day year after year, by simply flooding the desert of
Sahara. England can be more easily conquered by deflecting the Gulf
Stream a quarter of a point than by a thousand ironclads. Who knows but
that it would be less expensive to change her into a glacier than to
bombard her with hundred-ton guns?

More white people are killed by railroad accidents yearly in our highly
civilized land than were slaughtered by native braves in the palmy days
of the "Last of the Mohicans." It is a fact that our boasted
civilization, instead of affording surer protection, murders more men in
one way or another than barbarism, only in the present case the victims
are not eaten; the coffins are sumptuous; the processions decorous; the
mourners in good form; the burial service pregnant with hope, and
culture is not shocked. With us murder is committed by corporations, not
by paid assassins. That is the difference. The assassin fails in his
blows once in a while; the corporation never.

But where was Russell? What was the nature of the calamity? The
impenetrable fact that there was an actual, invisible dead line cast
about that territory, with Russell as its centre, became confirmed with
every report. It will be recalled that all the railroad tracks entering
the doomed city were twisted as if clawed by a maddened monster. It
presented a similar appearance to the South Carolina railroad on the day
of the Charleston earthquake. This gave rise again to the earthquake
theory. But why had not the shock been felt? No rumble had been heard.
Could an earthquake account for the deadly something that filled the
air?

No intelligence came from Russell. The way must be forced to it.

Who forgets the relief expeditions started in wagons and on foot from
every point of the compass? These were invariably repelled on reaching
the dead line. We could understand the fetid miasma that made the Great
Dismal Swamp an unknowable country. We could comprehend the encroaching
dead line of the spreading yellow fever bacillus. But this fearf