This disease was unknown in America until the opening of the African slave-trade. It is an African disease, intensified and aggravated by the rottenness and filthy habits of the human cargoes that brought it to America. It was entirely unknown at Vera Cruz until brought there in the slave-ship of 1699.[3] In like manner it was carried to all the West India islands. When the negro insurrection in San Domingo drove the white population into exile, the disease was carried by the immigrants to all the cities of the United States, and even to the most healthy localities in the interior of Massachusetts. Old people still remember when New York was so completely deserted that its principal streets were boarded up, and watchmen went their rounds of silent streets by day as well as by night. The fever of the present year can be traced directly to this accursed traffic. Slaves had been smuggled into Rio Janeiro, who brought the disease in its most virulent form from Africa. In that city it was carrying its hundreds to the grave, when a vessel cleared for New Orleans, having the disease on board. This vessel disseminated it in the upper wards of the city, while at the same time there arrived from Cuba another vessel which, from a like cause, had caught the vomito at Havana, and from this second vessel the disease was disseminated in the lower wards of New Orleans. It was the meeting of these two independent currents of the fever in the centre of the city, on Canal Street, that caused that fatal day on which three hundred victims went to their long homes. Such were the fruits of this offspring of an inhuman trade in a single city, in a single day. FRIAR PAGE.