■658 
ED. NOCARD. 
England has benefited by the experiment and has understood 
the importance of a good sanitary police, we have seen her re¬ 
sort to such severe measures against foot-and-mouth disease. 
Aphthous fever, that disease, so mild that it makes animals 
scarcely sick, prevents them from eating for a few days, per¬ 
haps a few weeks, and gets worse so easily. English people, 
who can count, know that it caused to their agriculture 
losses far inferior to those of rinderpest, decided to get rid 
of it, cost what it might. Indeed, foot-and-mouth disease 
spreads with extreme rapidity by all the modes of contagion, by 
the animals, by the objects they have soiled, the people, the 
buyers who go in the barns to examine them, etc.; it recidi¬ 
vates frequently at short epochs. I know barns where it has 
occurred twice in one year, but this is rare. The possible re¬ 
turn of the disease increases, and if one considers that in every 
great epidemic many animals succumb or must be destroyed, an 
idea can be obtained of the enormous losses agriculture has to 
stand. England, knowing all this, with her characteristic reso¬ 
lution, has immediately done all which was necessary to get rid 
of it. First she closed her ports, and that in a radical way, 
easily carried out by her insular situation—she does not allow 
the landing of live animals coming from infected countries. 
She is protected from a new invasion from outside. From the 
interior she has adopted regulations and exceedingly strict and 
minute measures, to which the people submitted without pro¬ 
test. 
Those severe measures have succeeded in entirely extinguish¬ 
ing the disease in Great Britain ; they would not be so effica¬ 
cious with us, where land frontiers are more difficult to guard 
against the importation of diseases of cattle. 
Stamping out (the general slaughter of all diseased or con¬ 
taminated animals) has been applied with no less success for 
contagions pleuro-pneumonia , but with this disease it was not 
England that applied it first. For a long time the duchy of 
Baden, Holland, and Switzerland have succeeded in suppressing 
contagious pleuro-pneumonia. England only imitated them, 
