Letter to the Editor
Epidemic in Tarant
Sir,
Your paper of yesterday contained an admirable article on the need to guard our city against the recurrence of plague, and most especially against the frightful scourge by which our metropolis was not long since desolated. Some of your readers may still be haunted by visions of ten years past, when an unknown necromancer caused the victims of a cholera epidemic to rise from the mass grave in which an uncaring Tarant had laid them to rest. Our police were hard-pressed to keep thousands of the recently departed from stumbling all the way from the Bethnal Road to Soho!
All of us decried the savage and unkind curse which drove that dread host from their rest, and sent them crawling and shuffling toward Marlybone, their carcasses still bloated and yellow from the cholera. We wondered, indeed, what demon could be so cruel? Why anyone would want to spread the affliction from the poor to the rich by magick?
Alas, ten years later I reflect on that army of the dead and I begin to sympathize with its unknown general! Knowing what I do now, I can see the kernel of sense behind his madness. What seemed at the time a senseless act of horror may well have been a warning, an accusation; and upon whom should it be directed, if not the wealthy landlords of Tarant?
You published the report of the Registrar-General on the health of Tarant during the week just past. It is stated that on the 13th, a case of spasmodic cholera occurred at No. 6 Turlington-street, in Paddington, and terminated fatally. The whole metropolis has furnished us with only two such cases, but this is by the grace of Providence only! You, of course, are not aware what sort of place Turlington-street is, but it may be well that the public in general should know.
Though constructed only within the last few months, and by courtesy called a street, Turlington is in fact a miserable hole, having no thoroughfare, and accessible only by a narrow passage from the Edgeware-road. The provisions of the Metropolitan Building Act have been utterly disregarded. This fact has been pointed out in succession to several parties: the district surveyor, the official referees appointed under the act just mentioned, the Secretary of State for the Home Department, the General Board of Health, and even the Board of Commissioners of Her Majesty's Woods, Forests, Land Revenue, Works, and Buildings. Nonetheless, all have refused to interfere to enforce the law, with the exception of the board last named, who have not condescended to give any answer at all!
In short: high-minded legislators and well-meaning reformers can pass all the laws they like, but it all comes to naught when those laws cannot be enforced. Our city is in just as much danger from an outbreak of deadly cholera today as it was ten years ago, when so many of our citizens perished of this dread disease. When the inevitable comes, we will have achieved nothing to forestall the deaths of hundreds, or even thousands of Tarantians. And when that anonymous benefactor raises the new plague victims from their sleep, I'm sure that having a place to point their dead fingers will be cold comfort indeed!
-a gentleman of the PREVENTIVE SERVICE.
