64 
EDITORIAL. 
For several years the Department of Agriculture and the Agricultural 
Societies of Great Britain and Ireland have been doing their utmost to prevent 
live cattle coming to this country; disease has been the main excuse, while 
cruelty to animals has been brought up from time to time. * 
Since the regulations passed by the United States Department of Agri¬ 
culture March 2d, 1891, for controlling the movement of export cattle, the loss 
of cattle at sea has been reduced from over six per cent, to less than one-half of 
one per cent. It is an unusual thing for a vessel to lose any cattle, or to land in 
crippled condition even during the winter months. 
The object in shutting out the live cattle is to assist the British farmer and 
breeder. The question of competition from dressed beef and mutton has not 
been brought up until this session of Parliament, where a bill is now pending 
for the marking of all foreign meats ; if this bill becomes a law, I presume it will 
be a common thing to see at some of the butcher shops ; meat labelled “ made in 
the United States of America,” as the law will apply to the live as well as the 
dead meat imported. 
I don’t think the English authorities are half so afraid of disease in foreign 
animals as they are of competition. The United States of America is the only 
country in the world that is sending cattle to this country at the present day. 
It may interest some of you gentlemen to know that between December 
27th, 1891, and January 2d, 1893, there has been 130,530 head of live cattle 
shipped to London, 149,782 to Liverpool, and 35,811 to Glasgow, making a 
grand total of 316,123 cattle shipped from the different ports of the United 
States, while thousands of quarters of dressed beef are shipped every week from 
the ports of New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore. 
When you come to consider what amount of food is necessary to feed the 
37,795,400 inhabitants of Great Britain, you can readily see that this is a con¬ 
suming country, and not a producing one as far as food is concerned. There is 
no doubt if England were thoroughly besieged that the inhabitants would be in 
a starving condition in less than two weeks. The value, in pounds sterling, of 
the food imported during 1891, is as follows : Live animals 9,244,589; meat, 
butter, cheese and eggs, 43,329,207 ; wheat and flour, 39,901,197; grain, hops and 
sugar, 47,882,979; fruits, nuts and vegetables, 9,997,844; making a total of 150,- 
355,816 pounds sterling, or three pounds, 19 shillings and 6 pence per head. In 
addition to this there is a vast quantity of fish, poultry and game imported. 
The prevailing diseases in London at the present day are pulmonary com¬ 
plaints and glanders. The law for the proper control of glanders only provides 
for quarantine, and not for slaughter at government expense, I believe some of 
the parish authorities do slaughter and pay for horses so diseased. 
The English authorities claim that contagious pleuro-pneumonia has been 
thoroughly eradicated; but as only four months of cold weather has elapsed 
since the finding of the last case, and as they wait for cases to be reported in¬ 
stead of hunting them up, I think hardly time enough has elapsed to be sure 
that isolated cases will not turn up in the future. 
Notwithstanding the fact that no live animals are allowed to enter this 
country, and have not been for more than a year, foot-and-mouth disease breaks 
out at short Intervals in different sections of the country remote from each other. 
