Tuberculosis. 425 



recently enacted statute) forbid compensation to the owner for any 

 animal killed because it is affected with a contagious disease, and 

 to prevent the extension of such contagion. All history attests, 

 and any consideration of human nature might teach, that such a 

 measure is only calculated to spread the infection. The owner of 

 an animal, affected with a contagious disease, who can get little 

 salvage by turning it into beef, and none at all if he hands it over 

 to the State for slaughter, will naturally think of putting it on 

 the market, where he can secure a good price. How much more 

 is he tempted to do this when the disease is an occult one, and the 

 animal shows the outward appearance of health, as is the case in 

 nine-tenths of many tuberculous herds ! Crime cannot be fixed 

 on the seller, for he is not an expert, and cannot be expected to 

 diagnose the disease. If the infected cow is of little value for the 

 dairy, she is passed on, from hand to hand, leaving infection in 

 every herd she has entered. The ultimate owner (in whose 

 hands the State finds her and diagnoses her disease), though he 

 may have bought her in good faith as a sound animal and paid a 

 correspondingly high market price, is made to lose the whole 

 value of the cow. The real offender who knew her to be a tuber- 

 culous animal, and sold her in consequence at the price of a sound 

 cow is shrewd enough to keep himself out of the clutches of the 

 law, while the honest purchaser who has been already swindled, 

 has his income and property cut off without compensation. Such 

 a law is self-evidently unjust ; it plays into the hands of the 

 swindler at the expense of the just man ; with the object of pro- 

 tecting the community against infection, it refuses to call on the 

 public for any contribution toward its own protection. The 

 system is a direct bid for extensive and encreasing violation of 

 the law and diffusion of the infection and must be accorded a 

 prominent place in the list of causes. It would be surprising to 

 find that any country ever extirpated an animal plague by working 

 on such a system. As a matter of fact no country ever did ; all 

 such sanitary successes from the extinction of sheeppox or rinder- 

 pest in Western Europe, to the recent stamping out of lung plague 

 in the United States, were based on a just compensation to the 

 owners of the stock. When, therefore, veterinary sanitary 

 principles and experience have been so far ignored as to allow the 

 passage of a law, which at once favors the diffusion of infection 



