The Philosopher's Mite to the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Date:
[1851?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Philosopher's Mite to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    17/36 (page 17)
    they neglected to reflect that they had lived five years under a monarch who, having sold his subjects and their interests for sundry pieces of money, had during that period encouraged an influx of the loose and disorderly from all parts of the Continent to a metropolis not adequate to supply them with well-ventilated residence. Looking at the statistics of the Re¬ gistrar-General, and comparing them with those of other parts of the world, we must be led to believe that the mortality in the populous towns of Great Britain, under the recent capricious epidemic, re¬ sponded in nearly the same relative proportion of cases, deaths, and population, to the statistics of most other parts of Europe, and certainly left you, by right, in no blind confidence as to immunity for the future. Those who admire you in public, and those who love you in private, must naturally feel anxiety that this grand undertaking should terminate so as to be a memorial of the great and good qualities of your head and heart. Your eagerness for action pro¬ ceeds from the most laudable motives, among which not the least is your sensibility to the evils which have accrued from international ignorance, and your ardour to obviate such evils. Yet would we have you call to mind, that among all the most dreadful circumstances attending upon pestilence, history shows few more revolting to the human mind than the wicked calum¬ nies with which men, smarting under the rod of Divine chastisement, have permitted themselves to load the good and great, whose names have been ever used as scapegoats in the hour of tribulation. Perhaps your B