to adopt measures to prevent its extension, concludes, "This Malevanchina is the cry of a sick population, a prayer for deliverance from drunkenness, and for improved educational and sanitary conditions."
But if Malevanchina is the cry of a sick population for deliverance from inebriety and from pernicious social conditions, what a terrible clamour of a sick people, and what a perdition for a rescue from the effects of wine and of a false social existence is that new disease which appeared in Paris with such fearful suddenness, infecting the greater part of the urban population of France, and almost the entire governmental, privileged, and civilised classes of Russia?
But if we admit that danger exists in the psychical conditions of Malevanchina, and that the Government did well in following the professor's advice, by confining some the leaders of the Malevanchina in asylums and monasteries, and by banishing others into distant lands, how much more dangerous must we consider this new epidemic which has appeared in Toulon and Paris, and spread thence throughout Russia and France, and how much more needful is it that society—if the Government refuse to interfere—should take decisive measures to prevent the epidemic from spreading?
The analogy between the two diseases is complete. The same remarkable good humour, passing into a vague and joyous ecstasy, the same sentimental, exaggerated politeness, loquacity, emotional weeping, without reason for its commencement or cessation, the same festal mood, the same promenading and paying calls, the same wearing of gorgeous clothes and fancy for choice food, the same misty and senseless speeches, the same indolence, singing and music, the same direction on the part of the women, the same clownish state of attitudes passionées, which M. Sikorsky observed, and which corresponds, as I understand it, with the various unnatural physical attitudes adopted by people during triumphal receptions, acclamations and after-dinner speeches.
The resemblance is absolute. The difference, an enormous one for the society in which these things take place, is merely that in one case a few scores of poor country folk have gone out of their mind, people who, living on their own small earnings, cannot do any violence to their neighbours and infect others only by personal and vocal communication of their condition, whereas in the other
