farther from one another – and not let such a contagion as this, which
is indeed chiefly dangerous to collected bodies of people, find a
million of people in a body together, as was very near the case before,
and would certainly be the case if it should ever appear again.
The plague, like a great fire, if a few houses only are contiguous
where it happens, can only burn a few houses; or if it begins in a
single, or, as we call it, a lone house, can only burn that lone house
where it begins. But if it begins in a close-built town or city and gets
a head, there its fury increases: it rages over the whole place, and
consumes all it can reach.
I could propose many schemes on the foot of which the government
of this city, if ever they should be under the apprehensions of such
another enemy (God forbid they should), might ease themselves of the
greatest part 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 infected people were
utterly careless as to giving the infection to others, and rather forward
to do it than not; and I believe it was partly from this very thing that
they raised that suggestion, which I hope was not really true in fact.
I confess no particular case is sufficient to prove a general, but I
could name several people within the knowledge of some of their
neighbours and families yet living who showed the contrary to an
extreme. One man, a master of a family in my neighbourhood, having