rt of the dangerous people that belong to them; I mean such as the
begging, starving, labouring poor, and among them chiefly those who, in
case of a siege, are called the useless mouths; who being then prudently
and to their own advantage disposed of, and the wealthy inhabitants
disposing of themselves and of their servants and children, the city and
its adjacent parts would be so effectually evacuated that there would
not be above a tenth part of its people left together for the disease
to take hold upon. But suppose them to be a fifth part, and that two
hundred and fifty thousand people were left: and if it did seize upon
them, they would, by their living so much at large, be much better
prepared to defend themselves against the infection, and be less liable
to the effects of it than if the same number of people lived dose
together in one smaller city such as Dublin or Amsterdam or the like.

It is true hundreds, yea, thousands of families fled away at this last
plague, but then of them, many fled too late, and not only died in their
flight, but carried the distemper with them into the countries where
they went and infected those whom they went among for safety; which
confounded the thing, and made that be a propagation of the distemper
which was the best means to prevent it; and this too is an evidence of
it, and brings me back to what I only hinted at before, but must speak
more fully to here, namely, that men went about apparently well many
days after they had the taint of the disease in their vitals, and after
their spirits were so seized as that they could never escape it, and
that all the while they did so they were dangerous to others; I say,
this proves that so it was; for such people infected the very towns they
went through, as well as the families they went among; and it was by
that means that almost all the great towns in England had the distemper
among them, more or less, and always they would tell you such a Londoner
or such a Londoner brought it down.

It must not be omitted that when I speak of those people who were really
thus dangerous, I suppose them to be utterly ignorant of their own
conditions; for if they really knew their circumstances to be such as
indeed they were, they must have been a kind of wilful murtherers if
they would have gone abroad among healthy people--and it would have
verified indeed the suggestion which I mentioned above, and which I
thought seemed untrue: viz., that the infect