Thus we began to feel, with regard to many-visaged death let loose on the chosen districts of our fair habitation, and above all, with regard to the plague.  We feared the coming summer.  Nations, bordering on the already infected countries, began to enter upon serious plans for the better keeping out of the enemy.  We, a commercial people, were obliged to bring such schemes under consideration; and the question of contagion became matter of earnest disquisition.

That the plague was not what is commonly called contagious, like the scarlet fever, or extinct small-pox, was proved.  It was called an epidemic.  But the grand question was still unsettled of how this epidemic was generated and increased.  If infection depended upon the air, the air was subject to infection.  As for instance, a typhus fever has been brought by ships to one sea-port town; yet the very people who brought it there, were incapable of communicating it in a town more fortunately situated.  But how are we to judge of airs, and pronounce—­in such a city plague will die unproductive; in such another, nature has provided for it a plentiful harvest?  In the same way, individuals may escape ninety-nine times, and receive the death-blow at the hundredth; because bodies are sometimes in a state to reject the infection of malady, and at others, thirsty to imbibe it.  These reflections made our legislators pause, before they could decide on the laws to be put in force.  The evil was so wide-spreading, so violent and immedicable, that no care, no prevention could be judged superfluous, which even added a chance to our escape.

These were questions of prudence; there was no immediate necessity for an earnest caution.  England was still secure.  France, Germany, Italy and Spain, were interposed, walls yet without a breach, between us and the plague.  Our vessels truly were the sport of winds and waves, even as Gulliver was the toy of the Brobdignagians; but we on our stable abode could not be hurt in life or limb by these eruptions of nature.  We could not fear—­we did not.  Yet a feeling of awe, a breathless sentiment of wonder, a painful sense of the degradation of humanity, was introduced into every heart.  Nature, our mother, and our friend, had turned on us a brow of menace.  She shewed us plainly, that, though she permitted us to assign her laws and subdue her apparent powers, yet, if she put forth but a finger, we must quake.  She could take our globe, fringed with mountains, girded by the atmosphere, containing the condition of our being, and all that man’s mind could invent or his force achieve; she could take the ball in her hand, and cast it into space, where life would be drunk up, and man and all his efforts for ever annihilated.

These speculations were rife among us; yet not the less we proceeded in our daily occupations, and our plans, whose accomplishment demanded the lapse of many years.  No voice was heard telling us to hold!  When foreign distresses came to be felt by us through the channels of commerce, we set ourselves to apply remedies.  Subscriptions were made for the emigrants, and merchants bankrupt by the failure of trade.  The English spirit awoke to its full activity, and, as it had ever done, set itself to resist the evil, and to stand in the breach which diseased nature had suffered chaos and death to make in the bounds and banks which had hitherto kept them out.