see evidently that the plague is carried from one to another by infected persons conversing with one another, or by clothes, goods, household stuff or merchandise (which have been infected) being carried from one place to another, and not by any general stagnation of air, or noxious fumes infecting the air, or poisonous particles carried by the winds from one country to another, or from one city to another, as some have imagined.

The effluvia of infected bodies may, and must be indeed, conveyed from one to another by air; so words are conveyed from the mouth of the speaker to the ear of the hearer by the interposition and vibration of the air, and the like of all sounds; but those effluvias cannot extend themselves a great way, but, like ill smells, as they spread they die in the air, or ascend and separate, lose themselves, and are rarefied in the air, so as to lose all their noxious or infectious quality; as the flavour of an orange garden, which in calm weather would be most sensibly felt at a distance all round the trees, will be lost immediately in a high wind, and be only smelt that way which the wind blows.

In the like case, I would caution those people who live in the outparts of, or adjacent places to, infected towns, to observe the blowing of the winds, and if the wind blows from the city towards them, let them for the time keep their windows shut on that side next the said town or city infected, and especially not stand talking or drawing in the air into their mouths that way; but if the wind blows the other way, and blows to the said infected city or town, then

they may freely open their windows and doors, and breathe and talk as they will; and this because the stench of the town may be carried some small length on the wings of the wind. But let no man fill the heads of his neighbours with the whimsey of doing this at any considerable distance, such as four or five miles or more, the nature of the thing making it impossible that the poisonous effluvia can keep together so long, or fly so low, as in that part of the air we breathe in, at so great a distance from the place.

If, on the contrary, we pretend by lines and troops to invest or surround any infected place, or a part of the country where such an infected town may lie, I affirm that it is not to be expected that this can be so effectually done as to be certain that none of the people shall get out; and besides the cruelty of locking up so many sound people with the sick, I say, it will never be effectually done.

First of all, for the standing troops, they are not sufficient in number, and 't is supposed the Parliament will hardly consent to raise a new army for such a purpose. As for the militia, how far they may be depended upon for such a service I refer to judgment. The militia are composed of the inhabitants of the neighbouring towns and counties where they serve; it will not be easy to prevent their conniving at the escape of an innocent neighbour, or to prevail upon them to kill a poor honest countryman for endeavouring only to save his own life, or to prevent their taking money to wink and look another way, or to take a wrong aim if they shoot; and,

after all, suppose them faithful, it will not be difficult for bold and resolute men, who, being made desperate by the distress they are in, care not for the risk, and are as willing to die one way as another,

I

say, it will not be so difficult for twenty or thirty men to join together in the night, and, with arms in their hands, to break through the militiamen, who, 't is known, are not great scholars at the trade of soldiering, when, if they were regular troops, they would not venture it upon any terms.

I shall not enter here upon the debate of the invasion of liberty, and the ruin of property, which must necessarily attend such a practice as this, I mean in case of investing towns. The equity of the case does by no means agree with things done in cases of other extremities, as the blowing up of houses in case of fire, drowning lands in case of an enemy, and the like; but this is really shedding innocent blood, which is a kind of evil not to be done that good may come, no, not of any kind.

More especially I object against this, as it is not likely to answer the means proposed. For example, should an infected person, by any adventure whatever, land at a town on our coast, and, which God of His infinite mercy avert, should he infect the family where he is lodged, shall twenty or thirty thousand people, who perhaps inhabit that town, be immediately surrounded, and, as it were, tied to the infected family till five parts in six of them perish? This was, as I' am informed, the case of the city of Toulon, only that the number dead there was exceedingly more ; certainly, if on the first surprise the inhabitants had

been permitted, or indeed ordered, to retire to some proper place at a distance from the city, and separated as they might have been, the lives of forty thousand people in that town, and the villages near it, had been saved.

It is true that in the time of the last great plague here houses infected were shut up, and it is true that the shutting up of a house is the same thing in its proportion, for that the sound are there shut up with the sick, as it is in a town; but the case with submission is not the same, for here the sound have time to go away. They may conceal the infected sick person so long, till they that are willing in the family to remove are removed, and then they are not driven back again like murderers, or shot dead for going away.

Besides, in private houses there is some difference in the equity of it, how they are all of a family, and have some obligation upon them to take the risk one with another; but it is not the same in a whole town, and I cannot but think men have a natural right to flee for the preservation of their lives, especially while they are sound and untainted with the infection ; and 't is a piece of cruelty inconsistent with reason, that because the distemper has reached suppose a house or family at one end of a town, that therefore the families at the other end of the town who are untouched should be imprisoned, and be bound to stay where they are till it comes to them; and thus, as it were, condemn them to death for that which is their disaster, not their crime, and kill those people for the good of others, of whom the others are in no danger.

As for the arguments drawn from necessity and the public safety, 't is fully answered in the proposal above of removing the sound people wholly from the place, and causing them to encamp either in tents or barracks, as the season will permit, till the infection is over.

And this I take to be a much better way (especially where the towns are not too large) than removing the sick immediately into barracks, because the sound can go safely away from the sick, and injure nobody in the remove; whereas the people to be concerned in removing the sick, and the houses they go out of, nay, even the air as they go along, may receive the infection from them, and it may be many ways dangerous to remove them, as well to others as to themselves. there is no danger of any kind in the sound going away from the sick, except the danger of any infected person going with them, which must be carefully guarded against; and they must remove their camp as often as they find that happen.

But

It is true this cannot be done in London, or in other considerable cities in general; that is to say, not by all the inhabitants; and there will be always a great number of people who care not to remove, whatever hazard they run. Some, if they should remove, know not whither to go; others have not sufficient to support them if they remove; and others, even though they could remove and have subsistence sufficient, yet will not venture. These we have nothing to say to, neither is there room to say anything of them; what is said above relates only to such as being desirous to remove are not permitted, no,