possessed no contagious property whatever. These proofs now lie
recorded by hundreds in their respective offices, and I take it upon me
to say, they will not be found contradicted by more than one out of a
hundred, amongst all the reports from the West Indies, which is as much
the birth-place of the yellow fever, as Egypt is of the plague: yet, in
the face of such a mass of evidence, as great or greater probably than
ever was accumulated upon any medical question, has our Government been
deluded, to vex commerce with unnecessary restraints, to inflict
needless cruelties upon commercial communities, (for what cruelty can be
greater than after destroying their means of subsistence by quarantine
laws, to pen them up in a den of pestilence, there to perish without
escape, amidst their own malarious poison?) and to burden the country
with the costs of expensive quarantine establishments. Surely if these
departments had done their duty, or will now do it, in so far as to
furnish our rulers with an abstract of that evidence, with or without
their own opinions, for opinions are as dust in the balance when put in
competition with recorded facts, it must be impossible that the delusion
could be suffered to endure for another year; or should they unluckily
fail thereby to produce conviction on Government, they can refer to the
records of commerce, and of our transport departments, which will shew,
if enquiry be made, that no ship, however deeply infected before she
left the port, (and all ships were uniformly so infected wherever the
pestilence raged) ever yet produced, or was able to carry a case of
yellow fever beyond the boundaries of the tropics, on the homeward
voyage, and that therefore the stories of conveying it beyond seas to
Gibraltar, must have been absolutely chimerical. It would indeed, have
been a work of supererrogation, little called for, for I think I have
fully shown that Gibraltar must be abundantly qualified to manufacture
yellow fever for herself.

No less chimerical will be the attempt to shut out Cholera Morbus from
our shores by quarantine laws, because throughout Europe, ready
prepared, alarmed, and in arms against it, they have succeeded nowhere;
whereas, had it been a true contagion and nothing else, they must, with
ordinary care, have succeeded everywhere; the disease, as if in mockery,
broke through the cordons of armed men, sweeping over the walls of
fortified towns, and following its course, even acro