"Yes, gentlemen," cried Gilbert, stoutly,
"we shall see. Aud may the time of trial not
be far off."

But, for all his brave words, the poor fellow
went away that evening with a heavy heart.

ALL THE WORLD AKIN.

THERE is a French word, " solidarité," which,
on account of its meaning and its usefulness,
might be naturalised into English without raising
much objection or opposition. It indicates
the connexion, the oneness, the intimate union,
the non-isolation implied by one member of
society being bound for, and affected by, the
welfare of the whole. The fact that all mankind
are akin and are nothing but an innumerable
brotherhood inhabiting one vast many-roomed
tenement, has become apparent from recent
discussions respecting the cholera, of which M.
Victor Borie has given a summary in the Siècle.

For the last thirty years, people have been
asking, What is cholera? Whence comes it?
How can its return be prevented? What is the
best defence against its attacks? When occurring,
how can they be cured?

We may fairly pass with slight consideration
any hypothetical, dreamy, or superstitious notions
respecting its final causes. We cannot
believe it to be the hand of Providence punishing
us for our evil deeds. Because Providence
is just; and so many honest folk have died of
the cholera, and so many rogues have escaped
or survived it, that that pious supposition must
be discarded. Nor can we believe the cholera
to be a natural means of keeping down a super-abundant
population. Men have been foolish
enough to say, " We want a good war; we
shall soon not know where to stow ourselves;
Europe is too thickly inhabited." But there is
NO good war. War is one of the most senseless
acts which our infant humanity commits.
Moreover, there are not too many inhabitants,
neither in the United Kingdom, nor in France,
nor in Europe, nor elsewhere. We cultivate
only one-tenth part of the habitable globe, and
we set-to to cut each other's throats instead of
cultivating the remainder. Truly, mankind is
an intelligent race!

It is poverty, and the weakness which it engenders;
it is debauchery and selfishness, which
undertake the task of limiting the population.
There is no need for either war or the cholera
to give them a helping hand. War is quite a
thing of human invention; and "the God of
Battles," if not a scrap of heathen mythology,
is certainly an abominable and absurd piece of
blasphemy. It is now held that the cholera is
an evil due to the same initiation; that the
cholera, like the plague, is the consequence of
human stupidity and folly; that, although we
cannot exactly say what the cholera is, at least
we know whence it comes. And, when once
we know the cause, can we not avert its consequences
by the effectual suppression of that
cause?

The cholera is hatched in, and takes its flight
from, the great delta of the Ganges, winch
throws itself into the Bay of Bengal through
seventeen principal mouths, and by an infinity
of smaller secondary channels. The mud, suspended
in the stream of the Ganges, precipitated
by mixture with the salt waters of the
ocean, forms along the coast shifting bars and
banks and pestilential marshes. The population
of those districts is very dense. The Hindoos
do not bury their dead; they confide them, on a
bed of leaves, to the stream of the Ganges, who
is commissioned to conduct them to " the celestial
domains." Wretches at the point of death
are sent adrift in similar style, in order that no
time may be lost.

The bodies are cast ashore at the mouth of
the river, in the midst of vegetable rubbish of
every kind, and the remains of animals heaped
together by the carnivores who abound in that
country. The mud of the river, acting like paint
or plaster, partially preserves the corpses of men
and animals from the dissolving influences of the
water, and converts them into a sort of glutinous
organic soap. Then comes the dry season, says
Dr. Selim Ernest Maurin, in the interesting
essay which he has published at Marseilles,
Prophylaxie du Cholera. The marshes, exposed
to the heat of a tropical sun, soon yield to
evaporation all the water at their surface. But
the heat incessantly draws upon the moisture;
the mud is laid bare, and in turn gives up all the
liquid which it has to yield. It then splits and
cracks in all directions, and the earth pours forth
mephitical effluvia, of whose offensiveness those
who have smelt the cadaverous odours issuing
from a vault can form but a faint idea.

ls it a fact that the yellow fever is attributed
to the miasms produced by the marshes of the
Antilles? Is it a fact that Parisot has demonstrated
that the plague is caused by the effluvia
exhaled from the Egyptian cemeteries when
sodden and soaked by the waters of the Nile?
Why, then, should not Dr. Maurin and his
colleagues be right in declaring that the delta
of the Ganges contains the fountain-head of
choleric invasions? Cholera exists in permanence
throughout all Bengal, but in the endemic
state. At certain epochs, whether in consequence
of a disease amongst, cattle, or in consequence
of the excessive heats, it becomes
epidemic. The river is laden with masses of
corpses on the way to their heavenly abode, as
the idiotic natives stupidly believe, and the delta
again reaches its maximum of infection.

Then the poisonous effluvia carried away by
the grand atmospheric currents, whose existence
is proved by the marvellous investigations of
Commandant Maury and Lieutenant Julien,and
which travel from the equator to the pole and
from the pole to the equator — are spread over
the greater portion of the earth's surface.
Maury speaks, and that without exaggeration,
of tallying the air, and putting labels on the
wind, to " tell whence it cometh and whither it
goeth;" by means of cholera, the breezes which
reach us from the delta of the Ganges are