6.45 P.M.
We have just slipped through quarantine like a fish. Our own extraordinary orders and two or three telegrams from Washington, with orders not to hold us up, made it an easy matter. We saw the Monterey, which had arrived in the morning, with six hundred and twenty-three passengers aboard, moored at the dock. The women and children were to sleep in screened tents on land. Many of them were refugees from Mexico City itself, and they cheered and waved, as we passed by, and called “O’Shaughnessy! O’Shaughnessy!”
The refugees, according to the copy of the Picayune the health officers left us, are loud in praise of Carden, saying their escape is due to him and not to the State Department, and giving incidental cheers for Roosevelt. Dr. Corput is a martinet; but though he was hot and decidedly wilted about the collar when his six-foot-two person came into the saloon where we were dining, he looked highly competent. It will be a bright microbe that gets by him. He, with his yellow flag, is lord and master of every craft and everything that breasts this river.
The whole question of guarding the health of the United States at this station is most interesting. It is one of the largest in the world, but is taxed to its utmost now by the thousands of refugees from Mexico, most of them cursing the administration, as far as I can gather, during the hundred and forty-five hours of travel since leaving Mexico. The quarantine station itself, under the red, late afternoon sun, looked a clean, attractive village, supplemented by rows of tents. There are immense sterilizers in which the whole equipment of a ship can be put, huge inspection-rooms, great bathing-houses, and a small herd of cattle. It is sufficient to itself. Nothing can get at the inmates, nor can the inmates, on the other hand, get at anything. I should say that the wear and tear of existence would be materially lessened during the one hundred and forty-five hours. The great ships that pass up now are laden with people who have been exposed to every imaginable disease in the Mexican débâcle. You remember the small-pox outbreak in Rome, and how that microbe was encouraged! Well, autre pays, autre mœurs. The Indian, however, thinks very little more of having small-pox than we think of a bad cold in the head.