CONTAGIOUS DISEASES OF ANIMALS. 
T 
our Southern representatives lias been a main cause of the defeat 
of every important measure for the stamping out of our animal 
contagia. While therefore strongly in favor of a law which 
will circumscribe the Southern or Gulf Coast fever, I am con¬ 
vinced that it will be highly injudicious to incorporate any such 
provision in a bill providing for the extinction of the lung plague. 
To do so is but to invite and insure defeat. Happily the Gulf 
Coast fever may be ignored for a year or two without fear of its 
becoming permanent in any of the Northern localities into which 
it is yearly introduced. Again, any measures which we can at 
present adopt do not look to its definite extinction, but only to 
its limitation to its present area. It is therefore as preposterous 
as injurious to continue to combine these two subjects in future 
Congressional bills. The lung plague question is a more urgent 
one in every sense. This disease is an exotic, and if extinguished 
once would only reappear in case of a new importation from an 
already infected country. 
Its area of prevalence in the United States is so limited that 
it could be easily, with perfect certainty and (relatively to other 
contagia), quickly and cheaply extirpated. Unlike Texas fever, 
anthrax and tuberculosis, it is not propagated in the soil, etc., nor 
is it capable of indefinite preservation out of the animal body, 
and therefore may be easily extinguished. It is unlike the Texas 
fever in that it is comparatively unaffected by climate or season, 
and tends to persist in any locality into which it has once been 
introduced and in which susceptible cattle are found. Every day 
of its existence on our Eastern seaboard threatens our Western 
herds as far as the very coast of the Pacific. The infection of 
the fountain of our cattle trade means the infection not only of 
our roaming Western herds, but of all the channels of trade into 
which they gravitate, of all our stockyards, of all our Middle and 
Eastern States, and of our exports. Our present losses from this 
plague are about $3,000,000. Our losses in case of the extension 
we are supposing could not be less than $50,000,000, represent¬ 
ing at five per cent, a capital of $1,000,000,000. Worse than 
all, such a tax once imposed cannot be wiped out, as no land has 
ever succeeded in stamping out this disease among roaming herds 
on uufenced grazing grounds. It is this that is to be feared more 
