PARLIAMENTARY INTELLIGENCE. 
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regulations, but to the great and terrible drought through which 
we had passed last summer, when for three months our sky was of 
brass and our soil was of iron. The result of the condition of the 
atmosphere was that for a considerable time we had no grass in 
this country, we had but very little hay, and our root crops were 
destroyed, and yet they were told by the right hon. gentleman, the 
President of the Board of Trade, that agriculture was never in so 
prosperous a condition as at present. (Hear, hear.) He (Mr. Head) 
asserted on the contrary, that graziers never had so disastrous a 
year as this, and that instead of realizing a profit they had sustained 
a considerable loss from the rearing of cattle. The Bill would act 
as a valuable safeguard against the future introduction of cattle 
plague into this country, and upon that ground he gave to it his 
earnest support. 
Mr. W. E. Forster said he believed that there were no members 
in the House prepared to regard that as a question of protection, 
but at the same time it could not be denied that a restriction on 
the importation of foreign cattle must, to a certain extent, act as a 
protective measure for the native producer. He felt persuaded that 
the only effectual mode of dealing with the cattle plague would be 
the adoption, when the exigency arose, of some most stringent 
regulation for the prevention of the movement of cattle through 
the country, and the measure which he had the honour of intro¬ 
ducing would invest the Government with the necessary powers for 
that purpose. The noble lord himself would not, he took it for 
granted, deny that the plague might be conveyed through the 
persons having charge of cattle from one market to another, and 
his measure would afford no security against such a danger. The 
noble lord himself did not appear to contemplate the total exclusion 
of foreign cattle—of the cattle of France, for instance—from our 
ordinary markets, and yet he had made in his Bill no provision for 
giving the Privy Council a discretionary power. They must all be 
anxious for an extension of the dead meat traffic, but he believed 
that such traffic would be best promoted under the widest possible 
free-trade system. It appeared to him that a compulsory rule for 
the slaughter of all foreign cattle could not be maintained unless it 
was shown that some decided danger existed of the spread of 
contagion. The Government proposed to deal with that question 
upon the principle of interfering with the foreign cattle trade as far 
only as might be necessary for the prevention of disease, and he 
thought that the Government Bill would provide the powers which 
would be indispensable for that object much more effectual than 
the measure of the noble lord. He would beg of the noble lord 
to withdraw his Bill, and he would undertake that if that course 
were pursued, an opportunity should be afforded to the noble lord, 
and to those who adopted his views, of raising those points on 
which they disapproved in the Government scheme before the com¬ 
mittee by which that scheme would be considered. 
Mr. Selwyn-lbbetson said he readily admitted that a Bill brought 
forward by a government was far more likely to lead to a settle- 
