360 Sanitary Police and the Cattle-Plague. 
be necessary to have a sanitary service organized in the same 
manner, because we ask the municipal authorities to do more 
than is possible for them in the midst of their place of habitation, 
with the conditions of their origin, and with the prejudices of 
their constituency. We must, in fact, avow that we do not 
always know how to bend to the law, and to accommodate our- 
selves to its yoke. We have also a much greater tendency to 
avoid them, when those who are charged to impose them live 
with us on those intimate terms which weaken authority. Under 
such conditions, the powers of a sanitary police, which are 
given to the Maires by the French law are, it should be remem- 
bered, too frequently at least, not placed in hands sufficiently 
energetic. Here is, therefore, one of the principal causes of the 
difficulty of application of sanitary measures, as they cannot 
produce their proper effect, except when they are everywhere 
carried out in their entirety. One single omission for a single 
moment, and contagion will find a road open before it ; thus 
it is spread, and thus is lost all the advantage which has been 
obtained by the efforts to restrain and extinguish it. For in- 
stance, when it is forgotten to disinfect a railway-waggon which 
has conveyed diseased animals, this waggon — a receptacle for the 
germs of contagion — transmits them to ail the ruminants with 
which it is loaded the next time ; and by their intermediary 
it will disseminate them in passage, even to a long distance. 
Numerous reports, transmitted to the central administration, 
carry evidence that, in too many cases, railway waggons which 
have not been disinfected have served as vehicles for the cattle- 
plague, and have been the most active instruments of its dis- 
semination. 
In Germany all is quite different. The trucks which have 
been used for the carriage of beasts are submitted to a disinfec- 
tion before being employed again for the same purpose. Water 
falls from a raised reservoir, and by its downfall and the force 
of its flow, it detaches and carries away the organic materials 
adhering to the sides. Besides this it annuls, by the elevation 
of its temperature, all the virulent activity in these materials. 
I have believed it necessary to enter into these details because 
the practice of compulsory slaughter, which forms the basis of 
all the measures which the Conference of Vienna has recom- 
mended, is too often regarded as a rude barbarous practice, and, 
according to some physicians, as the negation of science and 
art. Also, too large a number of agriculturists, inspired by 
false ideas, repudiate it in the name of their interests, which 
they thereby injure, and frequently in the name of their senti- 
ments, with which they thereby clash. Instead of conforming to 
it as the law requires, they too often have recourse to clandestine 
