A GRAVE DECISION

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1686, 22 June 1904, Page 70 (Supplement)

A GRAVE DECISION

ATTEMPTS TO FIGHT THE PLAGUE IN INDIA-ABANDONED IN W DESPAIR.

From India comes the disturbing news that the plague is raging there more fiercely than at any moment since its appearance seven years ago, and that the British Government has resigned itself to allowing the fell disease to run its course unchecked. Although more than two million persons have perished oi' the" plague in the Deccan since its outbreak, and the whole of India’s trade and industry lias, been gravely affected

by its ravages, the exports from Bom-

bay, for instance, having fallen off to the extent of some 30 per cent., yet ~.v t he English authorities seem to have 'no alternative in the matter. A mere handful in the midst of a teeming population of over three hundred millions of natives, they find themselves helpless in the face of the more or less passive resistance of the whole people to enforce those measures which are necessary to arrest the spread of the pest. Isolation, segregation and inoculation have been in turn tried, without success, and have j merely served to arouse the discontent j of the natives and to damage the pres- . tigo of the Government by demonstrat- j irg its powerlessness to enforce its de- j mands. And so the authorities have resigned themselves to the inevitable, and infected, perhaps by the atmosphere of fatalism which prevails throughout the Orient, have given up the fight against the decrees of Providence, m ! so far as the plague is concerned. j The action of England in, the matter | is of profound interest to every maritime j>ower, especially to those who, like the United States, possess colonial depend- j • eneies in the Orient, for it will be neces- j sary to increase the precautions against' the pest at every foreign, port doing trade with India, which now being more than ever regarded as the home of the > plague, is destined to witness a still • greater decline of her commerce, and , consequently also of her industry, than she has suffered until now. Moreover, now that the British, who are past mas : ters in.the art of dealing with Orientals*, and whose experience of the latter extends over a period of more than two hundred years, have virtually given up the struggle of endeavouring to instil principles of sanitation into the 'Asiatics and to protect the latter from . „ the pestilences which periodically carry off by 4 - millions the surplus population, it is probable that other colonial powers, • such as Germany, France, Russia and

Holland, will follow suit, and that in the Philippines Uncle Sam will abandon the hopeless task of inculcating his dusky lieges with distasteful Western notions of sanitation. ,

It was only the other day that I read in a letter from Manila a graphic account by one of the United States officials there of his own efforts and of those of his associates to arrest the spread of cholera and other epidemic diseases by the introduction of some of the most elementary rules of hygiene, according to our Western ideas. The entire letter, from the opening sentence to the last line, breathed the same spirit of absolute hopelessness that has led the British authorities in India to abandon, after seven years of the most arduous warfare, all further fight against the progress and the spread of the plague. It was a letter that must have appealed to every one who, like myself, has lived .in the Orient, and who has learned by experience that religion, caste, time-honoured customs, the mode of life, and, above all. the pronounced tendency of the Asiatic of every clime and creed, constitute insuperable obstacles to the successful application m the Far East of the rules of sanitation of the Occident. . . Of all the vehicles of contagion there are none- that play a greater role in the spread of disease than water, let it seems impossible to get even the most intelligent of Orientals to understand the necessity of keeping pure the water supply. High caste Hindoos, who regard contact with even the very shadow of a pariah as contamination, will not hesitate to quench their thirst from the pool where the corpse of some cholera-stricken native of low degree has a few minutes previously been subjected to its-last ablutions. Peasants think nothing of drawing their drinking water from the same pond that receives the drainage of their entire village, and in Dami'stta, prior to the British occupation of Egypt-, I can recall that the intake of the water for the various fountains and city reservoir was situated a Jew yards below the spot ‘where the open sewers, such as they were, emptied their unsavoury contents in the River Nile.

Worst of all are the porous earthenware jars and the “mussacks,” or goat skins, in which the water is carried. They are never cleaned- or disinfected until the crockery gets broken or the skins burst asunder through mingled foulness and old age. The major portion of the water drunk throughout the Orient is conveyed to its consumers in this fashion, and eminent scientists have shown time and again that when once the germ of some disease has secured

a foothold in the slimy interior of a “mussack” or of an earthenware jar, it will infect successive charges of water, no matter how pure the sotirce of the latter’s supply. > But) the latter seldom is pure. For the native water carrier, unable to understand our prejudices about the matter, in nine cases out of ten, fills his jars and bags from the nearest tank or pool, no matter how polluted. Then there is the question of personal cleanliness and of that of the houses. One finds the most majestic of mosques and temples, and the most exquisite and fairylike of palaces throughout the East defiled by the most filthy abominations, which apparently offend neither the olfactory nerves of the natives nor yet their sense of propriety and cleanliness. The houses of the affluent and the huts of the poor have each their own domestic heaps of offal, sometimes alongside, sometimes beneath, the raised .floor, which is never removed, but kept ripe by daily additions and by the constant rootings of the pariah, dogs, the vultures, the razorbacked hogs, and the other members of the beast and bird creation that attend to scavenger duty m the Orient. The markets, too, are a great breeding ground for epidemics and by the Philippines riots were almost precipitated in various towns and villages by the insistence on the part of the American authorities that the accumulations of centuries of rotting fish, meat, vegetable and fruit matter should be carried away and destroyed, and the various market booths burned and new ones built before any further buying or selling was allowed , there. Fire is a favourite agent of purification employed by the white man in tlis Orient; one, too, that used with a ruthless hand, especially during the visitations of the cholera and of the plague, has served to intensify the hatred with which s in spite of all that is said to the contrary, the foreigner is regarded by the Alsiatic. Convinced that tho dirty conditions of the native dwellings were responsible for much of .the spread of the disease, the torch has been freely applied to them. But it has proved of no use. For experience has shown, among other places recently at Hong Kong, that the inhabitants of the houses which had been destroyed by the health authorities had carried into their newly constructed abodes the infection of the plague by means of the insects harboured on their persons and in thenclothes. Fleas, in fact* are pronounced responsible for the latest outbreak of tue plague in native quarters that had been carefully disinfected and pronounced wholly free from contagion. This shows that clothes—in th"

of the Oriental —are almost as disastrous in the spread of disease as is water. Some natives who invariably wear th<ckanest- raiment will never wash, while others who perform numerous dadv ablutions insist on resuming and weai ing their clothes, especially those cm; cealed from view, until they are '«■ tested with vermin and drop to pier from old age. In the end the re.su is the same, and unfortunately the wlr man in the Elast finds himself obliged by his sense of propriety to insist upon th-‘ use of clothes, his prejudices on tt • score of decency manifestly predomi ruing sanitary considerations. Wherevr the white man has made his appear?!r ■ in the East he has endeavoured to

cure the enactment of ordinances if ing the natives to wear clothes. In '' Siamese capital, at Singapore, in otbo cities of the Orient, even the very ok ren that in their bronzelike nudity o stituted such a picturesque feature the public thoroughfares, have be., obliged by stern law to garb themself, “decently,” much to their dismay a* amazement, being wholly unable to co prebend that they had been guilty any impropriety. In fact, it was leu before they understood, and at Bangka especially, the youngsters, when clothes laws were first enacted, seem-' to believe that the statutory loin cl could he worn around the neck or turn fashion, or hanging gracefully down i ■ back—in any way, indeed, except mtn manner demanded by our Western r - tions of decency.

Nowhere has, however, this quest, of clothes worked more disastroi ly than in South Africa, whore the « cline of the Kaffir population is ascnfcf according to the recently issued repo based upon the testimony of office missionaries and traders of exper.or dwelling among the natives, to the wring of clothes, which is likewise declar to be responsible for tlie prevalence o. number of diseases previously unkm/ among the blacks. The latter in naked state would often bathe. .1

when clothed he ceased to bathe —n-.-\ ■ strips, indeed, until the last shred ol garment drops off of its own accord, his wild state rain and damp scare - caused him even discomfort. But i-m? clothed Kaffir seldom possesses “change.” On reaching a hut vm through he crouches close to the tie, and so, after a few days or rnonti.-, learns by sad experience of those stiange maladies from which the white man suffers —rheumatism and pulmonary affections, and especially consumption.—ExAttache, in the “New York Tribune.”