A Lesson to Mankind.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume III, Issue 447, 29 April 1890, Page 3

A Lesson to Mankind.

“ YE ARE ALL MEMBERS ONE OF ANOTHER.” In a late number of the Review of Reviews the following article appears :—lf Sir Robert Rawlinson and Dr Symes Thomson be correct, the disease (influenza), which has this month united Mexican peasants, Italian princes, and English nobles in a communion of suffering,

carries with it a far more notable lesson of human brotherhood. For they believe that the cause of these aches and pains which have closed German theatres, shut up French schools, and semi paralysed the business of Europe, may be traced to a terrible disaster which overwhelmed the Chinese province of Honan in the spring of 1888. We heard with but languid emotion the news that when the Yellow River burst its banks seven million Chinamen were drowned. The Chinese are, to most of us, hardly regarded as beings within the pale of humanity. Voltaire's sarcasm, that there were few who could resist the temptation to kill a mandarin in Pekin if it could be done by pressing a button in Paris, hardly exaggerates the sentiment of the white man about his yellow brother. But now Nature has taken a notable and effective method of teaching that the saying, “ Ye are all members one of another,” includes the Chinese as part of the common human family. For in the horrible compost of Chinese corpses left to putrefy by the million in the ooze left by the devastating flood were generated countless millions of organic spores. These, i when the hot sun dried up the moisture, became dust, which the wind took and carried westward for the scourging of the nations. Slowly at first the marsh-born microbes crept across the great northern plains of their native continent, but on reaching the confines of Europe they availed themselves of the resources of civilisation, and swept with almost electric rapidity to St. Petersburg, and from thence to all the civilised lands. Not even the broad Atlantic could stem their advance. Everywhere in the New World, as in the Old, the ghost of John Chinaman swept like the wild huntsman across land and sea. and, as potentate and pauper went down in misery and pain before the clammy touch of his fevered finger, he seemed to ask, ** Am I not also a man and a brother! * .