MEAT INSPECTION. 
485 
tended for use as food in his own family, or has relied upon 
the sterling honesty of his butcher. 
Recent social, political and commercial changes have 
seemed to separate farther and farther the consumer of meat 
from the producer, and a knowledge of its fitness for food 
becomes more and more difficult to obtain, until under our 
present environments the meat we obtain at a butcher s stall 
night appropriately be termed a mystery. An Eastern capi- 
alist, who is in no wise learned in regard to the diseases of 
:attle, owns a ranch some 3,000 miles distant in a Western 
Territory, which he visits at intervals of several years, and 
eaves the sale of cattle to irresponsible men, who neither 
mow nor care whether they be healthy or not, and from his 
sands they are shipped 3,000 miles to a great slaughter house, 
rhere the cattle are bought for the express purpose of slaugh- 
eringto sell again, and thence the meat is sold to a wholesale 
leat dealer in some distant city, or, perhaps, several thousand 
liles away in some foreign country, then again resold to a 
jetail butcher, who finally disposes of it to the consumer. 
Jntil within the past few months this process has taken place 
1 this country under the solitary eye of the interested seller, 
3lely from a mercenary standpoint, and leaving the consumer 
1 the most absolute ignorance possible as to the source and 
unitary condition of his meat supply. The meat consumers 
ad thus reached the climax of ignorance as to their meat 
ipply, and had attained the pinnacle of danger to which a 
eople can be subjected through the use of diseased meat. 
Other countries, have, in some cases, quite old established 
eat and milk inspection laws, and under the goadings of 
itional enthusiasm and love of country, it has been reported 
tat certain of the most highly civilized European nations 
ive ample inspection laws which are effectively administered 
V a thoroughly trained and organized corps of inspectors. 
In the matter of government meat inspection, Germany 
aims, and perhaps justly, priority in point of effectiveness, 
it if we are to judge the work by its fruits in the preven- 
m of the transmission of diseases from animals to man, or 
y the evidence adduced by the highest German authorities 
