Sanitary Police and the Cattle'Plague. 
361 
modes of treatment, and, when success appears to crown their 
efforts, they argue from it, by every mode of publicity, to pro- 
test against the excess of official measures, and to demand their 
reform. This is a view which is altogether dangerous. The 
question is not to ascertain whether the cattle-plague can be 
cured to a certain extent ; it is not even disputed that, even in 
Europe, a minority of the affected animals, very small compared, 
with the remainder, may escape death. But it is necessary to 
ask whether the animal that is allowed to live does not itself 
constitute a public danger, and whether, consequently, the public 
interest does not exact its destruction in the shortest possible 
space of time. The answer to this question cannot be doubtful. 
Incontestably, it is dangerous to allow an animal to live if it is 
affected with the plague; because each one of the particles of 
its mass is large enough, if one may use the expression, to 
infect the whole of a herd, or the whole of a commune, a district, 
a province, or even an entire continent. Most of the epizootics 
of plague which have, from time to time, burst forth from the 
Eastern Steppes upon Europe or Africa have commenced with 
the infinitely little, and have ended in the infinitely great. 
The epizootic which entailed the loss of a million head of cattle 
in Egypt, twenty-five years ago, was imported through the me- 
dium of a few beasts belonging to the Roumanian principalities. 
It was a very small herd, purchased in Esthonia, which infected 
England in 1866, and inflicted upon that country the enormous 
damage which it sustained. It was by a dozen oxen, exported from 
London to Rotterdam, that Holland, infected in its turn at the 
same period, saw the plague acquire such proportions that it 
became for that country, the bovine population of which is 
so condensed, a veritable public calamity. This infinitesmal 
minority of a dozen oxen entailed the loss of no less than a 
hundred and fifty thousand head of cattle. 
We thus see what history teaches us. It is because all this 
is known ; because we now possess a certain knowledge of the 
foreign nature of the cattle-plague ; of its contagious properties, 
as the exclusive condition of its manifestation beyond its native 
country ; of the activity of its contagion ; of the diverse and 
multiple modes of its propagation and of its expansion ; it is 
because, in fact, we know all the disasters that it inevitably 
i entails when we allow its fire to kindle and increase, that the 
sacrifice of the smaller number ought to be required to protect 
and save the greater. 
The practice of compulsory slaughter is then essentially 
rational and scientific, because it has for its foundation the most 
exact knowledge, acquired by means of history, observation, and 
I experiment. 
