In Enfield 32 In Uxbridge 117 " Hornsey 58 " Hertford 90 " Newington 17 " Ware 160 " Tottenham 42 " Hodsdon 30 " Edmonton 19 " Waltham Abbey 23 " Barnet and Hadly 19 " Epping 26 " St Albans 121 " Deptford 623 " Watford 45 " Greenwich 231 " Eltham and Lusum 85 " Kingston 122 " Croydon 61 " Stanes 82 " Brentwood 70 " Chertsey 18 " Rumford 109 " Windsor 103 " Barking Abbot 200 " Brentford 432 Cum aliis.

Another thing might render the country more strict with respect to the citizens, and especially with respect to the poor, and this was what I hinted at before:  namely, that there was a seeming propensity or a wicked inclination in those that were infected to infect others.

There have been great debates among our physicians as to the reason of this.  Some will have it to be in the nature of the disease, and that it impresses every one that is seized upon by it with a kind of a rage, and a hatred against their own kind—­as if there was a malignity not only in the distemper to communicate itself, but in the very nature of man, prompting him with evil will or an evil eye, that, as they say in the case of a mad dog, who though the gentlest creature before of any of his kind, yet then will fly upon and bite any one that comes next him, and those as soon as any who had been most observed by him before.

Others placed it to the account of the corruption of human nature, who cannot bear to see itself more miserable than others of its own species, and has a kind of involuntary wish that all men were as unhappy or in as bad a condition as itself.

Others say it was only a kind of desperation, not knowing or regarding what they did, and consequently unconcerned at the danger or safety not only of anybody near them, but even of themselves also.  And indeed, when men are once come to a condition to abandon themselves, and be unconcerned for the safety or at the danger of themselves, it cannot be so much wondered that they should be careless of the safety of other people.

But I choose to give this grave debate a quite different turn, and answer it or resolve it all by saying that I do not grant the fact.  On the contrary, I say that the thing is not really so, but that it was a general complaint raised by the people inhabiting the outlying villages against the citizens to justify, or at least excuse, those hardships and severities so much talked of, and in which complaints both sides may be said to have injured one another; that is to say, the citizens pressing to be received and harboured in time of distress, and with the plague upon them, complain of the cruelty and injustice of the country people in being refused entrance and forced back again with their goods and families; and the inhabitants, finding themselves so imposed upon, and the citizens breaking in as it were upon them whether they would or no, complain that when they were infected they were not only regardless of others, but even willing to infect them; neither of which were really true—­that is to say, in the colours they were described in.