24 THE LUNG PLAGUE OF CATTLE. 



a second aiid a third stable so long as they can find some one willing to 

 take them. It follows that those in the early stage of the disease or in 

 process of recovery, being short in their yield of milk, are rapidly passed 

 on from herd to herd, passing a few days in each and leaving the seeds 

 of disease at every stopping place. 



Finally, the city cow-dealer is often the real owner of a milkman's cows, 

 lie furnishes a dairy with cows, taking a chattel mortgage on them for 

 an amount often approaching to double their real value, and thus 

 obliges the milkman to pay interest on far more than his real stock m 

 trade. If disease appears among the cows, the dead animals are replaced 

 by others at the same ruinous rates, and the unfortunate milkman dare 

 not buy from another source lest the first dealer should foreclose his 

 mortgage and ruin him by the simultaneous loss of his stock and his 

 milk route. It is manifestly to the interest of an unscrupulous dealer 

 to carry this oppression just as far as the subject can be made to bear, 

 and there are some men in the business just rapacious enough to avail of 

 their opportunity to the utmost. The lung plague increases the deaths, 

 the deaths increase the demand for fresh cows, and the introduction of 

 fresh cows means the investment of their spare cash at double the legal 

 rate of interest. 



Such is the state of things in our large eastern cities, which has served 

 to spread and perpetuate the lung plague. And unless these are tem- 

 porarily put a stop to, it will be a most difficult and expensive matter 

 to stamp out this disease when already well established in such a city. 



Restrictions on the westward progress of the plague. The state of things 

 along the Erie Railway is the exact opposite of that on the south of New 

 York. From the New Jersey State line westward there is no large city 

 for the distance of about 200 miles, and consequently no combination 

 of a large and poor population and a free pasturage on open unfenced 

 grounds on which the herds of different owners could mingle. The 

 valuable arable land is all fenced in, so that if by accident tbe germ of 

 the plague were introduced it would be quite likely to remain confined 

 to the one herd until all the susceptible animals had passed through it, 

 when, in the absence of new purchases or births, it would expire for lack 

 of fresh subjects. Again, if the owner decided to sell such an infected 

 herd, he would naturally send it to the stock -yards in New York or Jersey 

 City, where, passing into au already infected region, they would fail to 

 give the disease a new extension. If by any chance a poor man who 

 could pasture his one cow on a Avild and unfenced mountain side had 

 obtained an infected animal from the east, 'it was so far removed from 

 others that the extension of the infection was next to an impossibility, 

 and the contagion was soon extinguished in death or recovery. Thus 

 the rugged mountain chain of the Alleghanies in preventing the forma- 

 tion of large cities likewise forbade the gradual extension of this pes- 

 tilence to Western New York and Ohio, as would otherwise have been 

 all but inevitable. 



More potent still in its protective influence has been the relatively 

 small value of cattle on the west of the Alleghanies to the prices they 

 brought on the seaboard, in the vicinity of large cities. No one, there- 

 fore, along the line of the Erie Eailway went to New York to buy com- 

 mon cattle, all demands being so much more cheaply supplied from the 

 West. It was high-bred cattle only that were conveyed from New York 

 and the seaboard to replenish the inland herds, but these were placed 

 on the farms of wealthy owners, which were carefully fenced, and where 

 every precaution was taken to prevent intermingling with adjacent 

 stock. Such stock could not be so summarily disposed of as common 



