This is no reason for discouragement, but the reverse.
It is not a defeat, but an attempt of the enemy to turn our flank.
We know enough of his strength and his arms to turn the check into a victory, if we are only wise.
But is not the following an example of action quite other than wise?
The report by the 'Sanitary Commissioner withQuarantine. the Government of India' on this same cholera of 1872 tells that people have been trusting much to quarantine for safety, and that quarantine has been fully tried, with results such as the following: 'In a question so intimately connected with the happiness of the human race, it cannot be too widely known that quarantine was tried in the hope of protecting a number of the cantonments of Upper India; that in many of them it signally failed, and that in no single instance is there the smallest reason to believe that it was productive of any good. The direct evils of quarantine are great enough, but … by no means the least indirect evil is this, that so long as men believe that they can escape from cholera by such means, they will never be fully alive to the importance of the greatest safeguard, sanitary improvements.'
Forced removals of sick, especially of women, for quarantine purposes, and other restrictions 'set the people against everything that is done under the plea of the public health,' and the sanitary reformer is regarded 'as the greatest destroyer of their domestic comfort and happiness.'
