CURRENT COMMENT
This dispatch from Jackson, Miss., appears in a recent issue of the Natchez News, regarding the efforts being made in Yazoo County to suppress the cattle-tick:
The News then gives the proceedings at a meeting of the city council, where strenuous measures were urged to wipe out this blot on the fair name of Yazoo County, and to permit her cattle to appear at the state fair. This is right, nor would any one object to any measures which the Jackson City Council might adopt, to rid the cattle of disease. But, incidentally, how many human beings are there in Yazoo County, Mississippi, to-day who are suffering from tuberculosis and typhoid fever, for example? Nobody knows! Will there be any quarantine against the people of Yazoo County on that account? Oh, no, they can all go to the fair and if any of them are suffering from these diseases, they can communicate the infection to others without hindrance. If one cow died of foot-and-mouth disease in Yazoo County to-morrow the fact would be known in Washington in twenty-four hours, and live stock inspectors would immediately invade Yazoo County. How many women and children died in that county last year? Nobody knows! They are only human beings, not live stock, and in a majority of the states in the union and in all of the southern states, the state pays no attention to the birth or death of a human being. A blooded calf or a pedigreed colt has its birth carefully registered, but the birth of a child is not worth recording. And when it comes to dying, if you are a human being, you can die whenever you like. The state has no money to waste in such “scientific nonsense” as finding out how many of its citizens have died during the past year, or whether the death-rate in Mississippi is growing or decreasing, or what diseases are killing its people. But ticks in cattle—that is a different matter. The cows must not be kept away from the state fair.