The Rangitikei Advocate. TWO EDITIONS DAILY. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1918. THE APPROACH OF PLAGUE.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XLII, Issue 11472, 26 February 1918, Page 4

The Rangitikei Advocate. TWO EDITIONS DAILY. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1918. THE APPROACH OF PLAGUE.

IN Mr Harold Williams’ dispatch from Potrograd a fow days ago there was a particularly significant reference to the difficulties which the Germans would necessarily hare to encounter in overrunning Russia. One of the most ominous of these was disease. For some yvecks now there have "been frequent references to a particularly virulent form of Asiatic plague which is now ravaging

some of the districts of Northern China. As is tlie way of such things it is travelling. It is making its way south, and was said sonic days ago to be nearing Pekin. Tho special and, probably, unique characteristic of this pestilence is *ts inevitably fatal in every case. It is not, therefore, a merely sporadic and local outbreak. It possesses a. vicious energy that will carry it far, and unless it is that the conditions in China are exceptionally favourable to its spread and its singular deadlines*! we may expect to see it extend far beyond tho confines of the Flowery Land. Recently an outbreak lias occurred in Russia. It also is of a particularly deidly cbaracter, the proportions of recovery from the disease being very much smaller than those that succumb. This, however, is probably an independent outbreak, tor wo have not yet heard of tho establishment of the usual chain of sequences by which it blazes a track for itself towards far off prey. But (lie conditions in Russia at present offer an extremely promising field for its deadly operations, and it cannot be long before tho Chinese type joins the Russian in its attacks upon a famine-weakened popular,ion. Tho prospect ! of a long occupation of the heart of Russia by the Germans, there ore, is not without its it terrors.

What are the possibilities in those days of such a scourge ravaging Europe - / ns- imagine that it lias been definitely barred out by sanitatiou, But lias it? The science which in some cities and countries lias swept clean the breading places of microbic diseases and Jins discovered multitudes of germicides for the gassing of them, has, no doubt worked miracles. It has ensured the armies almost complete immunity from most of the more deadly types of disease in a terrain in Franco, Belgium and Greece, which must be packed with the germs of all the maladies which have ravaged Europe for thousands of years. But it Jims not abolished all of them. Wo still catch colds and influenza, and the cleanest cities are never without fevers and such affections |as diphtheria, or death would only come to most of us by accident or old age. Some diseases seem to have their cycles of repetition. It may be possible that in countries in which tire laws of sanitation arc scrupulously observed, in nine times out of ten when the deadly disorder reaches their frontier it finds no conditions favourable to its propagation in a population whose vitality is at normal pitch and which is well-to-do and well fed. But it may arrive at a time like the present when whole populations, from lack of food and mental worry, are infinitely below par, and find in them material for an awful

massacre. Germany, Austria and the little peoples they have conquered and robbed of their food are in that vulnerable condition at present. It is I perfectly certain that if the disease once obtained a footing in Central Europe and in Turkey it would turn them into one vast graveyard. German vital statistics for last year show that the mortality of the civil population was so groat that, quite apsrt from war losses, the births were fewer than the deaths; while in Britain the new population made up for deaths at the front. It 1 is not, therefore, a far-fetched supposition that plague may impose peace sooner than munitions and vast armies in conflict. It might become so deadly to overwhelm all other considerations. In the fourteenth century, of the hundred thousand people who then inhabited London, fifty thousand wore buried in one cemetery alone, and it is stated that only one out of every ten was left alive. Both Pepys and Evelyn have left records of the awful mortality in Britain, but especially iu< London by the plaguo which in the 17th century almost depopulated Europe. On April iiOtn Pepys records: “Great fears of the sickness here in the city, it being said ihat two or three houses arc already shut up. God preserve us all!’’ But at the end of

August be gave the number of deaths as ten thousand a week and the fact that the living were hardly, numerous enough to bury the dead is shown by one incident on which he remarks. “In the streets did overtake and almost run upon two women crying and carrying a coffin between them; I suppose the husband of one of them, which, methiuks, is a sad thing.” Row then if Mr Williams’ prophecy conies true, and tiie greedy Hun runs up against such a terror as that of three centuries ago, and introduces it to his own country?