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The Cattle Plague,

From the Tribune,

Our last accounts of the cattle plague in England show that up to the 3d of March, during the six months in which the epidemic has so far prevailed, 187,059 cattle have been infected, of which 117,654 have died directly from the disease, and 26,136 have been killed by way of preventing its spread. But this statement is only the Inspector's report, and does not pretend to give the whole number of cattle which have perished since the beginning of the pest in the latter days of August. A partial plague of the same character broke out also among the sheep some months ago; but we are not distinctly informed of the extent of its ravages. It appears that the general epidemic had increased steadily up to the latest mail from England, every step of its march becoming more alarming. The number of deaths, which averaged eight thousand or more per week in September, increased from 1700 to 2000 in October. Up to November, 17,673 animals had been attacked, of which only 848 could recover or would be allowed to recover.

By the middle of November, 20,000, or, as was stated, one in a thousand had perished; and up to December, 40,000 had caught the disease. By the 1st of January the number reached 73,549: 7683 dying in one week; and in the last week of January, 9243. By the middle of January, 107,098 had been attacked, only 15,527 remaining under treatment. The February papers picture the plague as positively awful in the country, and by the middle of the month, 150,000 cattle had become infected, and all but 40,000 had died. At this writing, the number of victims cannot fall short of 200,000, five-sixths of which have perished absolutely.

These are only the Cattle Inspector's figures, while it is possible that the entire live stock killed by the plague is much nearer to 300,000. We can have no idea of the number of beeves prematurely killed and sold at from one to two shillings per pound by the butchers, in order to save both meat and money. But from all these facts, it is plain, in the gravest sense, that our neighbor, John Bull, has been rapidly losing flesh.

Several opinions have been current in England as to the origin of the pestilence. Some of the country farmers satisfied themselves in tracing it back to the cow-keepers of the metropolitan districts (a class more or less kindred with our own metropolitan swill-milk makers), and there stopped inquiry. That the disease was imported from Russia, and communicated from the large centres, is, however, the more accepted belief. It is remarked that in Russia animals are in general treated with greater hardship and discomfort than in any other part of Europe. But we have no doubt that in the crowded cattle-markets of England there was every condition to invite the disease. London periodicals have related, from time to time, those mysteries of atrocity which, in the conveying, driving, and killing of fevered and exhausted flesh, make up a part of the popular beef supply of London.

The fact seems consequent and obvious—a timely warning, too, against the dangers of our own slaughter-house system—that in all the earlier stages of the plague the greatest ravages occurred in the metropolitan districts. We are a believer in that trite, patent maxim which declares that there is no reason whatever for epidemic in nature: but if cholera breaks out among men who are packed and penned together in artificial pest-holes, no wonder, then, that the plague will at last infect the brutes which, in a hundred nameless ways, undergo untold miseries that the barbarous indifferentism of civilization cannot afford to inflict directly upon itself. The wretched contact of huddling, driving, and stifling crowds of insane and distempered animals, is conserved to give a taste to our common beef. It would not surprise us to hear that all the unnecessary torture which beef undergoes before it is eaten reacts, in some measure, upon the eater. Inspectors of meat and milk have only a superficial office. Laws against cruelty to animals, and societies for its detection and prevention, are urgently needed.

As yet no decided measures have been taken in England to check or stay the epidemic. Professor Gamgee, it appears, predicted its wide spread from the start, unless an immediate resort was had to the pole-axe, the favorite Dutch and Prussian mode of extirpation; but this apparently cruel and costly, but now (it seems) necessary method, has not, till of late, gained the mind of the authorities. The Professor further argued that, as the disease proceeds from contact, the transportation of cattle in large numbers should be at once stopped on all the large railways, and that cattle sales and beef shows should be suspended in the market towns—an advice followed in part by local communities, which have even gone so far as to close the ordinary live-meat markets for months, giving wide room to the vegetarian doctrine, and a text and sway of which it had not dreamed. But it was not till about a month ago that the suggestions of Professor Gamgee and others took shape in a bill presented in Parliament by Sir John Grey.

One feature of this bill, providing for the compensation of cattle-owners by the collection of land-rates, gave rise to a debate in which Bright and Mill took part against the stubborn defenders of that oppressive privilege and curse of the English economy, the law of primogeniture. The aristocracy, who are mainly the land-owners, and can rent their lands at artificial prices, propose, in short, to lay the added expense of the plague principally on the impoverished farming classes of lessees, who are the greatest losers by the calamity, and whom, too frequently, its ravages have cut short of ability to pay their year's rent. Now, it is vigorously insisted that the land monopolists or nobility should take their due, proportionate land-share of the burden which threatens to fall so heavily on the farmer; and thus the cattle-plague, if it lasts long enough, promises to assail with some effect the enormous immunity of hereditary tenure in England.

All methods of treating the plague have thus far proved ineffectual, except in a few cases. Allopathy and homeopathy have been explored in vain for a curative. Vaccination, after a thorough trial, has failed. In Holland, where the pest is also at its height, a number of cattle, it is said, have been cured at a very early period of the disease by the well-known hydropathic practice of rubbing and wet-packing. A German grazier is reported to have applied petroleum to the skin and food of the animal with preventive success. Finally, an American doctor undertakes to show that the disease is caused by parasites growing on the skin, and can be checked by a washing of corrosive sublimate. This theory, which appears wide apart from the experience of English doctors, would link the cattle-plague with the trichinae disease now destroying the pork-eaters of certain parts of Germany; but no conclusive sign of the worm has yet been found in beef.

According to Mr. Townsend Glover, who wrote in November last from Europe, the disease is not at all unlike that which was so alarmingly epidemic in Florida some years ago, where cattle were stricken down, after a short suffering, in apparently "good condition," till a post mortem examination proved the contrary. It may be as well to assure ourselves that our own cattle are not exempt in a given contingency, while the rinderpest remains a problem and a plague.

Another date from England assures us that new figures are added to the sum of disasters, in the violent breaking out of the plague among sheep. The murrain has now become a more national alarm than even the epidemic of Fenianism; and it remains to be seen what effect the former will have upon the English landlord policy.