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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: This made the watchmen be the less regarded, and perhaps
occasioned the greater violence to be used against them. I mention it
on this score to observe that the setting watchmen thus to keep the
people in was, first of all, not effectual, but that the people broke out,
whether by force or by stratagem, even almost as often as they
pleased; and, second, that those that did thus break out were generally
people infected who, in their desperation, running about from one
place to another, valued not whom they injured: and which perhaps, as
I have said, might give birth to report that it was natural to the
infected people to desire to infect others, which report was really false.
And I know it so well, and in so many several cases, that I could
 A Journal of the Plague Year |