Military life in Italy : sketches - Societa italiana di storia militare

THE CHOLERA OF 1867. 377
desolated by the poverty which the famine of the previous
year had produced, and increased by the scanty harvest of
that season and the enormous mortality in the herds. Most
of the merchants had failed ;
the construction of railways had
been interrupted ; many provincial and communal works had
been left half completed the men were
;
without work ;
the
shops for luxuries had been closed first of late many of those
for the necessities of life ; also, the work-shops abandoned ;
hundreds of familes reduced to living on herbs and India figs ;
on every side famine, discouragement, and squalor.
To culminate the general misfortune there spread and took
root in the minds of the people the old superstition
that the
cholera was the effect of poisons scattered about by the order
of the government, which the common people in most of the
the southern districts (in consequence of the oppression of a
past government) regard as an enemy who is secretly and continually
trying to harm them for its own preservation. In
Sicily this superstition had been accepted from the conviction
that the government wished to inflict punishment for the rebellion
of September, and for this reason a great part of the sanitary
precautions taken by the government met with a stubborn
resistance in the common people ; every action appeared an
outrage ; in every order they suspected some rascally design ;
from the slightest indication they drew some argument confirmatory
of the poisoning, and they saw some attempt in every
trifle. The hospitals, disinfections, visits of public officers,
were all the objects of diffidence, fear, and abhorrence. The
populace could not be induced to allow themselves to be taken
to the hospitals, except at the last moment, when every case
was useless. The majority of them died ;
and just for this