COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE 265 



upon, the no less destructive pestilence of live stock, introduced 

 as the result of war and left in the trail of the armies as evil 

 seed, which goes on multiplying and extending for years and 

 decades, bringing calamity and ruin where formerly prosperity 

 and abundance reigned. 



This extension of animal plagues through the armies in the field 

 holds good for comparatively recent times as well. Pestilences of 

 animals have devastated Europe during and following every great 

 European war — the Thirty- Years War, the Napoleonic wars, the 

 Franco-German War, the Schleswig-Holstein War. The same is 

 true of the South African War, the Philippine War, and even of 

 the war of attempted secession in the United States. In the latter 

 case, in the absence of the animal plagues of Europe, glanders, 

 introduced among the army and commissariat horses, increased 

 steadily until the end of the campaign, the Confederate cavalry 

 being put virtually hors de combat by the affection, while the 

 Federal horses and mules sold at the mustering out of the army 

 corps, carried glanders into all our large cities and many country 

 districts, so that even now, nearly half a century after, it continues 

 in many places as a virtual plague. 



More recently, the modern means of rapid locomotion and the de- 

 mands of a growing industry and commerce have taken the place of 

 warfare in the diffusion of animal pestilences. Under the shadow 

 of a peaceful and more or less beneficent development, the deadly 

 venom is hidden away in the rapidly moving articles of trade, and 

 unless carefully guarded proves no less destructive than in the days 

 of disastrous wars. The Oriental cattle and sheep are now car- 

 ried by steamship in two days to western Europe, a journey which 

 formerly took weeks or months. The steppe cattle of central Asia 

 may be sent west by the Trans-Siberian Railway and landed in 

 western Europe in four days, instead of one or two hundred, as 

 before the age of steam transit. With changed conditions, the 

 precautions must now be taken in connection with business move- 

 ments and the pestilence must now be confronted and arrested 

 by preventive measures which too often place us in antagonism with 

 wealth, and with influences, political and legislative, which wealth 

 seeks to control. 



