This mildness of the
ancients, in whose manner of thinking inhumanity was so often and
so undisguisedly conspicuous, might excite surprise if it were
anything more than apparent. The true ground of the neglect of
public protection against pestilential diseases lay in the general
notion and constitution of human society--it lay in the disregard
of human life, of which the great nations of antiquity have given
proofs in every page of their history. Let it not be supposed
that they wanted knowledge respecting the propagation of
contagious diseases. On the contrary, they were as well informed
on this subject as the modern; but this was shown where individual
property, not where human life, on the grand scale was to be
protected. Hence the ancients made a general practice of
arresting the progress of murrains among cattle by a separation of
the diseased from the healthy. Their herds alone enjoyed that
protection which they held it impracticable to extend to human
society, because they had no wish to do so. That the governments
in the fourteenth century were not yet so far advanced as to put
into practice general regulations for checking the plague needs no
especial proof.
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