DUE PREPARATIONS FOR THE PLAGUE ERHAPS my method in the preparations I am now to speak of may be something singular; but I hope they shall not be the less profitable. I shall make no more introductions. I divide my subject into two generals: 1. Preparations against the Plague. 2. Preparations for the Plague. The first of these I call preparations for the body. Both, I hope, may be useful for both, and especially the first shall be subservient to the last. 1. Preparations against the Plague; and these I divide into (1) General, Public, and National Preparations, namely, for keeping it out of the country or city or town we live in, and preventing its spreading and penetrating from one place to another; the measures which are now taking, being, I must needs say, very deficient; and (2) Particular Preparations, such as relate to persons and families for preserving us from infection in our houses, when it pleases God that it shall come into the city, or place wherein we live. General preparations seem to be confined to the measures which the Government or magistrates may take to preserve the people from infection. The main thing the Government seem to have their eyes upon in this nation is to limit and prohibit commerce with places infected, and restrain the importation of such goods as are subject to be infected; here it is granted that some goods are apt more than others to retain the poisonous effluvia which they may have received in foreign parts, and, by consequence, are apt to emit those effluvias again when they arrive here and come to be spread. These poisonous or infectious effluvia, or particles, as some call them, take hold or seize upon the people who are handling them. I need not enumerate the particular sorts of goods which are thus esteemed susceptible of infection. Abundance has been said on that subject by other authors, and all our proclamations, Acts of Parliament, &c., which have been passed on this subject, have taken notice of them. It is true that, as I have hinted before, our Government have seemed sufficiently careful to settle such limitations of commerce, prohibitions, and quarantines as have been necessary to be observed by ships and passengers coming into his Majesty's dominions, with respect to the places suspected as well as to such as are known to be now visited, and also to extend those limitations and restrictions to more places and ports as they have thought fit, and as the infection has been found to advance nearer and nearer; and had the injunctions thus laid on our people been punctually and duly observed, possibly we might with some ground have been encouraged to hope for deliverance, or at least to have flattered our selves with a possibility of guarding our principal places against it. But I must not omit that we are not a nation qualified so well to resist the progress of such a distemper, or the entrance of it into our country, as others are. We have a set of men among us so bent upon their gain, by that we call clandestine trade, that they would even venture to import the plague itself if they were to get by it, and so give it to all that lived near them, not valuing the gross and horrid injustice that they do to other people. What a man ventures for himself is nothing, because it is his own act and deed; but what he ventures for others is the worst of violence upon them, and perhaps, in such a case as this, is the worst sort of murder. This vice in our commerce is introduced by the necessity this nation has been in of clogging foreign trade with heavy duties and imports, which gives encouragement to smugglers and runners of goods to venture at all hazards to bring such goods in upon us privately, and these men, I doubt I may say without injuring them, value not what the goods are or whence they come, so they can but bring them on shore free of the duties and imports I speak of. We have examples of this before us, which justifies the charge, and I need say no more to prove it. The preparations against the plague in this case must be the work of the Government. It is confessed that this is a difficulty even to the Government itself, and it will be hard to say what they can do more than is done effectually to prevent this |