SANITARY POLICE AND THE CATTLE PLAGUE. 
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 recommended, 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 agricul¬ 
turists, inspired by false ideas, repudiate it in the name of 
their interests, which they thereby injure, and frequently in 
the name of their sentiments, with which they thereby clash. 
Instead of conforming to it as the law requires, they too often 
have recourse to clandestine modes of treatment, and, when 
success appears to crown their efforts, they argue from it, by 
every mode of publicity, to protest 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 con¬ 
stitute 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 doubt¬ 
ful. 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 medium 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 popu¬ 
lation of which is so condensed, a veritable public calamity. 
This infinitesimal minority of a dozen oxen entailed the loss of 
no less than a hundred and fifty thousand head of cattle. 
