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CHAPTER XI. 
FEDERAL AND STATE QUARANTINE OF THE UNITED 
STATES, INTERNATIONAL SANITATION OF THE PAN- 
AMERICAN REPUBLICS, 1905, AND THE WEST INDIAN 
INTER-COLONIAL SANITARY CONVENTION, 1904. 
P'ederal and State Quarantine oe the United States and Inter- 
national SANITATION OF THE PaN-AmERICAN REPUBLICS. 
In this chapter I refer both to the measures v/hich the United States 
Government adopts to prevent Yellow fever entering the States, and to the 
movement which it has set on foot throughout the American Republics to 
get rid of Yellow fever by combined action. The United States, stimulated 
without doubt by the success of its work in Havana, has more than any 
other country in recent years directed particular attention to Yellow fever, 
and since the recent severe epidemic in New Orleans, with new facts at its 
disposal, its action will, there is reason to believe, be still more vigorous. 
The International Sanitary Convention of the Pan-American Republics held 
in Washington in October is evidence of this. The Southern and Central 
American Republics, including those which surround British Honduras, have 
combined with the United States in an endeavour to eliminate Yellow' fever 
from those places in which that fever is endemic or liable to occur owing to 
their Geographical Position, Commercial Relations or Bad Sanitary Conditions. 
British Honduras from its geographical position, commercial relations, and 
from the fact that the Stegomyia fasciata exists in abundance at its ports, is 
a place exposed to Yellow fever; the large number of British ships w'hich 
trade in the Gulf and with Central and Southern America are liable to 
convey Yellow fever, and, lastly, the increased interoceanic communications 
across Central America and the projected Panama Canal, all of w'hich bring 
infectious disease nearer to the East, are reasons which make modern inter- 
national sanitary movements of the greatest importance to Great Britain. 
Previous to the year 1893 each State of the Union had its own quarantine 
laws, and often used them to the detriment of neighbouring rival States. 
For instance, a State might either be very lax in enforcing quarantine and so 
threaten the safety of the Federal States as a whole, or quarantine might be 
made a pretext for exacting exorbitant charges, and might then constitute 
an unnecessary drag on commerce. 
In 1893 an Act of Congress w r as framed, followed subsequently by certain 
addenda, empowering the Secretary of the Treasury to promulgate uniform 
quarantine regulations for the ports of the United States, to be put into 
force by the separate States or by the Municipalities. The Act, however, 
