Mr. Henry Bergh, who has done a good work for horses in New York, and tried to do a good deal of work not absolutely good for other animals (cats for instance), has one quality of a successful reformer; he can use strong language. He denounces M. Pasteur as “A Jenner in France who now crawls to the earth’s surface and begins the fiend-like and disgusting work of polluting the bodies and flesh of the lower animals.” Mr. Bergh does not believe in inoculation for small-pox. It is a pity he does not confine his benevolence to horses and their sorrows, a subject which he understands.
Constant gains characterize the uses of electricity. Recently a message was sent from Australia to England in twenty-three minutes, over 13,318 miles of wire. French experiments in the use of electricity as a motor are making rapid progress. Telephone messages have been sent 1,200 miles, from Cincinnati to Baltimore, and we are not certain that this is the best record. Bulwer’s “Coming Race” did everything by just touching buttons and setting automata at work. Perhaps that race is really “coming” after all.
What is in a name? The cholera is no worse, nor any more curable, by calling its cause a microbe (literally minute life, meaning microscopic insect). It does help us, however, to emphasize old truth. The diseased are usually victims, Dr. Koch says, of the microbes. If the digestive organs are impaired, the microbe attacks them with more success. Still, we are thus far not very much wiser for the terms microbe and bacillus. Meanwhile, Dr. Koch’s first practical rule, that “dry heat is fatal to the microbe,” is contradicted by the well-known fact that cholera in Asia is very much at home in the dryest heat known on the globe.
The papers report that a colored man having married a white woman in Indiana has been tried for the crime and sentenced to five years in the penitentiary. We can not discover any use in such proceedings. As we have remarked once before, the mixture of races is not brought about by legitimate relations of the sexes, but by illegitimate. Indiana punishes the wrong people. For one mulatto born in marriage there are a thousand born out of wedlock. Besides, it has not been proved that the moral quality of a crime attaches to marriage by persons of different races. It is highly speculative morals, at all events.
The New York financial troubles of May have, as we anticipated, led to no general disaster. In New York the business community is well over the panic, stocks have recovered astonishingly, and general trade is active and good. Credit lines are closer than they were; but this is a good result. A large harvest gives the people assurance of cheap food, and stimulates enterprise. The shock in May has proved a blessing. We need to be reminded often that honesty, diligence and prudence are necessary to business success, individually and collectively.