Genre:

Regular Feature, Editorial, News-Commentary

Subjects:

Sanitation, Imperialism, Mental Illness, Temperance

    Reports that in India the 'attempt to enforce sanitary measures of precaution against the plague has led to much angry discontent among the natives, who regard sanitation as a craze of the white man, and who bitterly resent the interference with their domestic privacies which it involves'. The discontent has now resulted in the assassination of the chairman of the plague commission in Poona and a lieutenant in the British Army. Advises that if the natives 'would much rather die than be kept alive by European methods of sanitation [...] we had much better let them die and be done with it', but also counsels that there is 'a zeal for sanitation which leads men to sanction a kind of persecution that is every whit as indefensible as the Inquisition'. (9) Also records the 'sensational' news of the suicide at sea of the South African millionaire Barnett I Barnato, who, 'although suffering from occasional mental depression, [...] had shown no symptoms of a suicidal mania'. Barnato nevertheless 'lived under too great a strain of financial excitement, and it did not mend matters that he began drinking champagne immediately after breakfast. Millionaires, especially those who are making their millions, should never drink anything except water'. (12)