TOE RUSSIAN PLAGUE.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XIV, Issue 82, 5 April 1879, Page 4

TOE RUSSIAN PLAGUE.

The Empire of Russia ia now stricken with a terrible plague. Thia ia the scourge of the Middle agee, the "black death" of the fourteenth century the blight which fell upon London in 1663, find destroyed nearly half of the population of Marseilles in 1720. Since that dread visitation in Southern France it has not returned to Western Europe save in 1815, when it crossed the threshold of Naples. In 1771 Moscow was under the curse, and several times during the present century has the plague passed over the Danube to lead a dance of death in Southern Rossis. During the terrible winter of 1828-29, before Diebitsch led an army of invalids across the Balkans, and through sheer audacity dictated the peace of Adrianople, the plague swept over Roumania until two thousand villages were infected and 83,000 RuEeian soldiers were lost in the hospitals. From May 1828, to February, 1829, the sick list comprised over 210.0CD names, and inasmuch as Von Moltke, the historian of the campaign, estimates that the whole strength of the army could not have been over 100.000 men, every soldier, on the average, was twice in the hospital. Ae early as May, 1829, the plague broke out on the right flank of the Danube, and before the winter set in, the victorious army was almost wholly destroyed, for not more than 10,000 men re-crossed the Pruth, and many of these were recruits. This time pestilence has not kept pace with war, but has stalked upon the scene not a long way behind. Two regiments of Cossacks, in returning from the seat of war, have carried with them the germs of infection, and, unless the accounts given by the Austrian and British medical journals are grossly exaggerated, the disease iB of a most malignant type, and is spreading rapidly.