380 REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTUR# 
nized as accessories, we must not allow them to withdraw our attention 
from the one condition essential to the development and propagation of 
the malady—the presence of the specific poison. To quote from my 
report of 1875, ‘The important poimt is this: We know this is a con- 
tagious affection, to the propagation of which all possible insalubrious — 
conditions contribute. - So soon as we concentrate our attention on 
this point we have the key to its prevention, if not to its entire extine- 
tion.” 
IS THE TREATMENT OF HOG FEVER GOOD POLICY? 
In taking what I know to be an unpopular position on this subject, I 
am led by the strongest convictions of duty. I weil know how popular 
would be an investigation into the curative powers of different systems, 
and even nostrums, in this disease, and how many breeders and dealers 
in swine will readily spend more than the value of the sick bog in the 
purchase of boasted specifies, to say nothing of the cost of attendance, 
and how they will rejoice over the wretched unthrifty animal whose life 
is at times preserved. It is not that recovery is impossible. A certain 
proportion, 20, 50, or even 80 per cent., will often survive. In my ex- 
perimental cases only 21 per cent. died and over 28 per cent. recovered 
from the first attack, so that they were used for further experiment, and 
this without any attempt at medication or treatment further than whole- 
some food, cleanliness, and disinfection of the pens. I am convinced 
that a still better showing could be made in the majority of cases if the 
sick animals were submitted to careful and intelligent medical treat- 
ment. 
Were the question of the preservation of the infected pig the only one 
or the main one to be considered, I would strongly advocate medicinal 
treatment. But the question is rather one of comparison between this 
one sick hog or herd and all the healthy swine in the same town, county, 
State, or nation. This is not a question of morality, but a problem in 
political economy, and when dealt with by a government must be de- 
cided on the ground of what is best for the whole nation. Uf, then, the 
preservation and treatment of a single sick hog means the incessant and 
incalculable increase in its body and secretions of a poison which is in 
the last degree deadly to other hogs; if this poison can be dried and 
preserved for a length of time, and carried meanwhile to a distance of a 
thousand miles, and if not hogs alone but sheep, guinea-pigs, and even 
wild animals like rabbits and mice, can contract the disease and convey 
the poison to any distance in their bodies, then the best interests of the 
nation demand that the sick animal shall not be preserved, but promptly 
sacrificed to the good of the community. 
This point is so important that I may be permitted to dwell on it a 
little further. Some of my experimental pigs were successfully inoeu- 
lated with quills that had been dipped in the morbid exudations of sick 
pigs in New Jersey and North Carolina, and had been dried and pre- 
served for from one to six days in this condition. Here we had the thin- 
nest possible film, such as might have adhered to the clothing of man, 
the hair of an animal, the feet or bill of a bird, the legs or prehensile 
organs of an insect, to a dried leaf, or even to a floating thistledown, and 
might have been thus carried ina great many different ways to infect 
distant herds. What was actually conveyed some hundred miles on a 
dried quill, and preserved its virulence for six days in this condition, can 
be as’ certainly preserved on any other dry object, and if brought by 
