ABSTRACT
George Cornewall Lewis was a Liberal politician who served in government as home secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Lord Palmerston administrations of the late 1850s and early 1860s. He wrote this memorandum early in his political career when serving as a clerk for Secretary of State for War and the Colonies Lord Glenelg (Charles Grant). Grant instructed Lewis to draft this memorandum in response to a French proposal to harmonize quarantine standards in the Mediterranean. A cholera epidemic had struck Malta and elsewhere in the Mediterranean the previous year and differing national regulatory responses across the sea had become apparent. In particular, over recent years, the British had been relaxing quarantine requirements at sea that had been in operation since the Italians had begun imposing such measures in response to the plague in the fourteenth century. The object of Quarantine Regulations is to prevent the introduction of contagious diseases into a country.
