30 THE LUNG PLAGUE OF CATTLE. 



THE UNVARYING ABSENCE OF LUNG PLAGUE, APART 

 FROM CONTAGION, A PERFECT GUARANTEE -THAT IT 

 CAN BE PERMANENTLY ERADICATED. 



The above extended review of the history of lung plague has been fur- 

 nished mainly to overcome the scruples of legislators who come to the sub- 

 ject unacquainted with its nature. The first lesson to be learned from it 

 is that in no historic time and in no part of the world has this disease 

 ever been found to appear de novo apart from the introduction of the virus 

 furnished by a pre-existing case. On the contrary, in every invasion of a 

 new country we can unerringly trace the cause in the importation of in- 

 fected cattle or infected products ; and in every case in which a nation has 

 bestirred itself and stamped out the infection no new cases have appeared 

 until there has been another importation of infected stock or their prod- 

 ucts. We have deemed it needful to unearth and disprove all the subter- 

 fuges which have been adopted to assail the above position, and have, as 

 we believe, established our proposition on an impregnable basis. This 

 established, it follows of necessity that it is yet possible for us to stamp 

 out this plague from the United States, and to exclude it for all future 

 time. And in such a matter, in which any delay may mean, and long 

 delay certainly will mean, the extension of the disease to our open cattle- 

 ranges, and the impossibility of stamping it out, the possibility of to-day 

 becomes a most imperative and urgent obligation. With the near pros- 

 pect of a general extension of the plague, and the yearly sacrifice of 

 tens and scores of millions of dollars to its insatiable craving, to say 

 nothing of the continued incubus on our foreign market, to delay the 

 work of extinction which is now in our power savors of criminality. If 

 this lung plague had ever invaded a new country without the previous 

 importation of strange (infected) animals or their products as a direct 

 and demonstrable cause, we might well find excuse for hesitation. If 

 history failed to show us a number of instances in which the invasion of 

 the plague had been met and driven back by proper sanitary measures, 

 and in which such countries had thereafter remained permanently sound, 

 or sound until the plague was reirnported, there might have been ground 

 for temporary inaction. Had the plague spread through the air from 

 east to west against the current of our cattle traffic, it might have been 

 feared that the mere local extinction of the infection would prove in- 

 effective, and it might have been pardonable to doubt somewhat the re- 

 sults of stringent measures of suppression. But with the extension of 

 the poison in the past thirty-three years only in the direction of cattle 

 traffic from the centers primarily infected, and its non-extension along 

 those lines where the absence of large cities and the fenced state of the 

 country were inimical to its maintenance, we have the amplest guarantee 

 that judicious suppressive measures would be thoroughly and perma- 

 nently successful. If the plague had already gained a footing in our 

 western plains and unfenced ranges generally, so that it had reached 

 the source of our cattle traffic ; if it had begun to spread from herd to 

 herd over our whole grazing territory ; or if it had cast its wither- 

 ing spell on the wild herds of buffaloes, sanitarians and statesmen might 

 well have paused ere they grappled with the danger. Had there been 

 the slightest ground for assuming that this pest of cattle could be gen- 

 erated anew by any special climate, hot, cold, wet, dry, steady, or 

 changeable ; or by the fatigues and sufferings of travel, or by the close 

 air of unwholesome buildings, there would have been some apology for 

 at least a temporary arrest of action. 



