Excerpt from Addresses of Hon. Norman J. Colman, U. S. Commissioner of Agriculture, and Dr. D. E. Salmon, Chief of the Bureau of Animal Industry: Delivered Before the National Cattle Growers' Convention, Held at Kansas City, Mo., October 31 and November 1-2, 1887

For six months the plague had been near you and you did not suspect its presence. And just here many men, through ignorance of the facts, reach wrong conclusions. They say if the disease were as dangerous as reported it could never have been stamped out after remaining unrestricted for half a year. They remember, of course, that it existed scarcely longer than that in England before it was recognized, and that it remains there to-day, in Spite of the greatest exertions to eradicate it. The difference in the two cases is just here: We had a system of railroads and telegraphs reaching to all parts of the country, which England did not have in 1842. More than that, we had a Bureau of Animal Industry with a liberal appropriation at its disposal for investigation. This England did not have, nor did she have any law to control the disease for twenty-five years after its introduction, and during this time it became too widely scattered, too thoroughly fixed, to be stamped out without more thorough measures than have ever been enforced there. Let me repeat, there fore, that the outbreak of 1884 has been suppressed only because we had money and men to investigate its location, and railroads and telegraphs by which we could trace affected animals across hundreds of miles of territory within a few hours.

The third lesson is the serious extent to which such an insidious disease may spread before it is discovered. The outbreak of 1884, which extended into four States and had existed more than six months before any trace of it came to light, is a very instructive example. Its progress for two years in the great live-stock center of the continent is a still more alarming demonstration of its nature. To the veterinarian such facts are not surprising. They are simply history repeating itself. The same thing occurred when various departments of France were infected, and was repeated in England. In a number of the great cities of Europe the disease was only dis covered when it had made too_ great progress to be controlled. In a country of enor mous territory like ours it is impossible to watch any considerable portion of it, and.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.