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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: from the 20th of December to the 9th of February, and from thence to
the 22nd of April. The weekly bills are the only evidence on the other
side, and those bills were not of credit enough, at least with me, to
support an hypothesis or determine a question of such importance as
this; for it was our received opinion at that time, and I believe upon
very good grounds, that the fraud lay in the parish officers, searchers,
and persons appointed to give account of the dead, and what diseases
they died of; and as people were very loth at first to have the
neighbours believe their houses were infected, so they gave money to
procure, or otherwise procured, the dead persons to be returned as
dying of other distempers; and this I know was practised afterwards in
A Journal of the Plague Year |
