“Other measures of a more coercive nature may be rendered expedient for the common safety, if unfortunately so fatal a disease should ever show itself in this country, in the terrific way in which it has appeared in various parts of Europe; and it may become _necessary to draw troops or a strong body of police around infected places, so as utterly to exclude the inhabitants from all intercourse with the country_: and we feel sure that what is demanded for the common safety of the state, will always be acquiesced in with a willing submission to the necessity which imposes it.” This announcement by the English physicians of 1831 was published throughout the land in the form of an Order of the King in Council. But the strong good sense of the public averted many of the mischiefs which these scientific advisers would have produced, had their counsels been carried into execution. The preventive measures which were eventually adopted by them consisted in prohibiting intercourse between one town and another by sea, and permitting it by land; thus, communication between London and Edinburgh by stage coach was perfectly free and uninterrupted, while communication between those capitals by sea was prohibited with such rigour that no interest, however powerful, could procure an exemption. Francis Jeffrey—at this time holding the high office of Lord Advocate of Scotland, and whose influence, from his personal and official connections, was very great—was unable to obtain permission for his faithful servant, in the last stage of dropsy, to go from London to Leith by water, lest he should carry with him to his native country, by that mode of conveyance, not the dropsy, which he had—but the cholera, which he had not. “You will be sorry,” writes Jeffrey to Miss Cockburn, “to hear that poor old Fergus is so ill that I fear he will die very soon. I have made great efforts to get him shipped off to Scotland, where he most wishes to go; _but the quarantine regulations are so absurdly severe, that, in spite of all my influence with the Privy Council_, I have not been able to get a passage for him, _and he is quite unable to travel by land_; he has decided water in the chest, and swelling in all his limbs. The doctors say he may die any day, and that it is scarcely possible he can recover.”—_Cockburn’s Life of Jeffrey_, p. 247.