At present, in all the Mediterranean ports they are, from fatal experience, scrupulously vigilant to guard, by a circumvallation of alarm posts, against the pestilential infection, and the clandestine entry of infected goods or merchandize. It rarely now gains admittance, by stealth into any of the European ports; (Constantinople excepted) or even if imported to our shores, the wise precautions and regulations, enacted by Quarantines, soon check its irruption and progress. This is a most interesting epoch and improvement in the police of modern states; for the original institution and rough draft of which, about 300 years ago, we are indebted to the Venetians. The political ordinances, however, enacted for the exclusion and suppression of pestilential contagion, were, until the present century, extremely erroneous and impolitick. Formerly, the plague in London, and in most other European cities, where it was permitted to sojourn, was rendered infinitely more terrifick and destructive by injudicious legislative regulations; especially by the barbarous sacrifice, and absurd policy of sick and sound immured together, with a forlorn motto on their doors, until all were dead or recovered. This was an effectual discouragement against an early alarm which, as in cases of fire, is of the utmost importance. It is evident, by the London bills, that a mere handful, at any time, died in the publick pest-house; consequently, every corner of the city was polluted with infection.
True plague is now chiefly chained down to Constantinople, and to Grand Cairo in Egypt, the two original, or at least one of the hotbeds and volcanos of pestilence; to several of the maritime towns of Asia and Africa situated on the Archipelago and Mediterranean; as Smyrna, Aleppo, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, &c. In many of these cities the pestilential miasma is hatched and accumulated into venomous malignity: it is in some nearly an annual, or triennial epidemick. At this day, plague almost solely wreaks its venom on the Mahometan nations, whose prejudices and ignorance, rivetted by religious and predestinarian absurdities, give licence and activity to its imperious domination. From such implicit and enthusiastick submission to the tenets of the Alcoran, joined to gross stupidity in science and philosophy, the Mahometans are encouraged, defenceless and rash, to brave this most malignant and terrible of the febrile host.
