28 
PLEURO-PNEUMONIA IN CATTLE. 
and more bitter experience than we have with this most insidious 
and dangerous of all animal plagues, and we are safe in saying 
that no fair promises, no half-way measures, nor even the best 
devised protective measures or system of inspection, while the 
work of extinction of the pestilence is still incomplete, will ever 
move that country from her present position of excluding this 
pestilence by the slaughter of all cattle coming from infected lands 
or shake her conviction that this is the only certain method of 
maintaining an immunity. This conviction has been thoroughly 
wrought into the English mind by the loss of over four hundred 
million dollars from this plague alone in the first forty years of 
its prevalence on the island, by the recollection of herds deci¬ 
mated, by a widespread agricultural distress, by the passage in 
rapid succession of every cattle insurance company on the island 
through the bankruptcy court, by the infection of her dependency 
of Australia, where a million and a half of cattle perished in the 
first fifteen years, and where the scourge still prevails in spite of 
the most determined efforts to root it out. If anything further 
had been wanted to deepen this conviction it was furnished in the 
successive infection of her other colonies in South Africa, Tas¬ 
mania, and New Zealand, where, as in Australia, the plague defied 
all control, and continues to prevail in consequence of the unfenced 
state of these countries and the constant mingling of the different 
herds. (For full particulars of these occurrences we beg to refer 
to our report of last year.) 
Persons unacquainted with the nature of this plague and the dis¬ 
astrous experience of it through which Britain and the British Colo¬ 
nies have passed and are still passing, may cling to the belief that 
some lesser measure— e. g., the examination of exported cattle, the 
export of cattle from uninfected ports only, the establishing of State 
cattle commissions with power to quarantine all infected herds 
reported to them or which they may discover, the appointment of 
veterinary inspectors of markets, the appointment of a federal cattle 
commission without power to force an entrance into suspected 
stables, or to properly dispose of infected herds, or some other 
measure short of the accomplished stamping out of the disease — 
shall woo from England an abolition of the Privy Council slaugh- 
