OCR Text |
Show THE PLAGUE IN INDIA. When the plague assumed an epidemic form in India nine years ago, the British Government tried its utmost to stamp it out. ' The agents found all manner of difficulties in the way. For instance, they would. go to a room where seven or eight people were; who would. report that they were all well, only to find out later that they were holding up one person on his feet, who had been dead with the plague for several hours." It is hard to combat with a pestilence among such people, and though nine years have passed, the Indian sanitary report-for 1904 shows that almost al-most 1,000,000 people 938,010 died of plague that year. The effort all the time has been to kill the rats, as they are the- chief means of transmission, but it is almost impossible to make any progress,' for the report says: "It is not easy to deal with a religious tenet that ; forbids the holder to leave an infected place with a tenderness for animal life that will not. sanction the destruction of a deadly serpent, with ignorance that is convinced that the plague is introduced and fostered by the Government in order or-der to reduce the redundant population, with suspicion sus-picion that sees the disseminating agents in every disinfecting party, or with timidity that may be turned by an ill-considered act into fanatical frenzy." That shows how hard a task the,Englishmen in India have. It is said that l5,0004ecaple are annually annu-ally killed in India by serpents, and yet, that people peo-ple are so fanatical that a father will not kill the serpent when it strikes his child. It looks as though the only way to rid the country coun-try of plague would be to surround the communities communi-ties where it exists and let the fanatics perish. ' |