542 
PROF. LAW. 
ORIGINAL ARTICLES. 
CONTAGIOUS PLEURO-PNEUMONIA IN CONGRESS, 
A Letter from Prof. Law , of Cornell University. 
The lower house of Congress has recently been the sphere of 
a spectacle which might well be held unique in this enlightened 
nineteenth century, and which demands to be held up before the 
people of America in a broader light than is furnished by the 
limited circulation of the Congressional Record. A bill was 
being considered which had for its object the entire extinction of 
the lung plague of cattle (a contagious disease which was imported 
from Europe in 1848); one which has in the past eight years 
cost us on our exports to England alone a yearly loss of over 
$2,000,000, and one which in the last three years, since its exten¬ 
sion into the Mississippi Valley, has cost in addition several mil¬ 
lions per annum. A further extension to the unfenced stock- 
raising territories is now imminent at the cost of a further yearly 
loss of tens or scores of millions additional. During forty years, 
ending in 1876, Great Britain lost $500,000,000 from this plague 
on an average stock of 6,000,000 head of cattle. We therefore 
should lose at least $1,000,000,000 in the same length of time 
upon our 30,000,000 cattle in case this plague were acclimatized 
at the source of our cattle trade, and sent in steady streams 
through all its divergent branches. The bill under debate pro¬ 
posed to appropriate $250,000 to stamp out this plague and 
restore us to the vantage ground we occupied before its importa¬ 
tion in 1848. 
It might well have been expected that a body of representa¬ 
tives paid by the people for attending to this matter would have 
given some little attention to the basis of this bill, so that they 
could at least act upon it with intelligence, or if they could not 
or would not do this that they would at least have voted accord¬ 
ing to the judgment of the Agricultural Committee, to whom 
they had delegated their sacred duty of studying and deciding 
