THE CHOLERA IN EUROPE.

Press, Volume XLII, Issue 6248, 28 September 1885, Page 3

THE CHOLERA IN EUROPE.

The ravages made by the cholera in Spain have, says the "European Mail," now attaintd proportions which may justly be regarded as stupendous. The latest accounts to hand state that the people are fleeing from the infected districts, carrying with them the clothing of members of the family who have been victims of the epidemic; and where this linen ie washed in towns hitherto free of the disease, the cholera claims fresh victims. The exodus into France is proceeding very extensively. According to the statistics which have been furnished, the numbers who have perished have amounted to upwards of 50,000, but it is very doubtful whether even this estimate measures the actual mortality. In Spain tbere is a poll-tax which operates to prevent a complete return of the population being made, and, irrespective of this, the returns of those who actually succumb to the epidemic are never even approximately accurate. But even if we take the numbers of the victims as correct, the effects of the plague are far in excees of anything with which even in the statistics of this dread visitation we have been made acquainted in any country in Europe since the first appeaianceof the cholera half a century ago. Nor are its ravages confined to those classes which are, for many reasons, supposed to be the most exposed to the operation of the epidemic. Some time since the Governor of a province succumbed, and only the other day the Archbishop of Seville was numbered among the victims. The epidemic has crossed the Pyrenees, and the daily returns of deaths at Marseilles are steadily increasing. It has hitherto been one of the curious characteristics of this terrible malady that it does not, except at very considerable intervals, repeat its course, and the fact that Marseilles was visited a twelvemonth since raised a certain presumption that it would have enjoyed immunity during the present year. Two years ago Egypt waa visited by the cholera, and the mortality at Alexandria, Damietta, Cairo, and other places in Lower Egypt was considerable, but since then there has been no reappearance there of the death-dealing epidemic. It was, therefore, in accordance with precedent, assumed that the disease had exhausted itself during the. past year in Southern Europe, and, as no further progress was made by it towards the North, that years would elapse before there would be a reappearance of the visitation. These anticipations have, unfortunately, proved t j be unfounded, and we are now in presence of a peril which has assumed far greater proportions than when, in 1883, in Egypt it threatened Europe. It is not only nearer to our shores, but it has 'assumed a virulence almost, if not entirely, unexampled since its first appearance in Western Europe.