174 
J. LAW. 
the open steppes of eastern Europe and central Asia. There, an¬ 
imal plagues in general find a perennial home. From these the 
best directed efforts of a thoroughly equipped sanitary commission 
have failed to eradicate them, and against these eastern plagues 
the adjacent European nations can only protect themselves by a 
most elaborate and expensive system of frontier inspection and 
quarantine, which is paralyzed on the occasion of every great 
war, and occasionally even circumvented by smuggling and cor¬ 
ruption, with the most disastrous effects to the western countries. 
Our cattle traffic from the west and south is so extensive that 
any efficient system of examination and quarantine, sufficiently 
extended to exclude this disease, would be impracticable, as the 
trade would be thereby completely suspended. Since, therefore, the 
trade must go on, the inevitable result of the infection of our western 
stock-runs will be the infection of our eastern States throughout, 
and a yearly loss which can easily be estimated by the correspond¬ 
ing loss in Great Britain, from the same disease, since its impor¬ 
tation, in 1842. Since that time Great Britain has lost in deaths 
alone, from this malady, on an average, $15,000,000 per annum. 
Tliis, it will be remembered, is on a stock of six million head, 
from which fail to be deducted the great herds of black cattle bred 
in the highlands of Scotland, which have hitherto escaped infec¬ 
tion, owing to the absence of the importation of strange beasts 
into their midst. Taking the same ratio, without this deduction, for 
our twenty-eight million head of cattle, our general infection would 
lay us under tribute to the extent of $60,000,000 per annum. Or 
if our herds increase at their present rate, our losses, by the end 
of the century, would amount to a yearly total of at least $120,- 
000,000. 
This it is the province of veterinary science to save to the 
country, by crushing out this most insidious and fatal malady, 
while it is still confined to the enclosed farms of our eastern States. 
At present this can easily be accomplished by sound and rigidly 
enforced veterinary sanitary laws. If the United States decline 
to avail of these, the sad truth of the above mentioned represen¬ 
tations will burst upon them with overwhelming force on some, 
perhaps, not distant day, and they will vainly turn for help to the 
