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If we turn to our indigenous animal contagia, we find the matter quite as bad. 
Porcine intestinal fever, the so-called hog cholera, has almost ruined the stock-owners in 
some of our best pork raising states. Within the last year complaints have come from 
all directions that hogs have been dying by hundreds, and nothing can be found to 
arrest the scourge. To show how extensive the losses have been, I may quote the 
conclusion of an eminent Iowa banker, a careful financier, and the least likely of all 
men to be astray in his figures, that in his county alone over $100,000 had been lost by 
the disease in swine during the year. Others have estimated that one-fourth of the hog 
crops of the West has been cut off in this way within the year. If then to allow 
an ample margin, we take but one-eighth of the hogs reported in the last census from 
our main pork producing states, 3,000,000, and estimate these at $5 per head, we reach 
a sum of $15,000,000 loss in a single year from this pestilence alone. 
Come to Texas fever and we are confronted by a very similar state of things. 
The losses from this affection have never been estimated to my knowledge. When they 
have become excessive as in 1868, a panic has ensued, which has led to a temporary 
exclusion of Gulf-Coast cattle from the Northern States during the heat of the summer; 
but with an immunity ot one or two years effacing the apprehension, and a further exten¬ 
sion of railroads, permitting of the transit of the Southern cattle through the Middle 
states without unloading, and Texas cattle are again carried to our extreme northern boun¬ 
daries during the hot seasons, forming numerous centres of contagion and mortality, 
from which all cattle must be carefully secluded until the approach of winter. The 
latest instances of this kind, in the extreme north that have come to my knowledge 
consist in extensive losses in the City of Detroit, in central New York, and in Worces¬ 
ter, Mass., within a few weeks past. 
We may flatter ourselves as we will of the sufficiency of local and State restrictions in 
checking the progress of this malady, but we will never place these restrictions on a 
permanently satisfactory and economical basis until we have them instituted, and carried 
out by the Central Government for the protection of the States at large. It it useless 
and worse to plead State rights as a barrier in a matter of this kind. No state has the 
right to make herself the highway for the transmission of a plague, which will devas¬ 
tate and ruin a neighboring commonwealth. It has been decided at the cannon’s mouth 
that no such right shall entitle any State or group of States to secede from the Union 
and no less imperative is it that no State rights shall be exercised to undermine and 
destroy our agricultural interests, the only solid and lasting foundation of all our varied 
industries and of our national wealth. 
The importance of stringent legislation for the extinction of glanders and farcy will 
hardly be disputed by any one at all conversant with the subject. Though they are 
I believe, perceptibly less virulent in the drier climate of North America than in Great 
Britain, and though permanent recoveries are not so rare, yet the prospect of cure will 
never warrant treatment when the glanderous deposits are softened and discharging, and 
especially in view of the danger of the loathsome infection implicating other solipeds, 
other genera of animals, and above all the human being himself. And yet in New 
York, as I have already stated, I have been compelled to witness the subjects of chronic 
glanders, again and again stalled in public stables, used on public highways, watered 
from public troughs, depositing the materies morbi on every object they touched with 
their muzzles, and snorting it out all around m their frequent endeavors to clear the nose 
and when the matter became too notorious I have had to look on helplessly, while the 
source of all the trouble has been conveyed away to new and unsuspecting communities 
