Prompt restrictive measures were taken, a quarantine was set up, vaccination against the disease was resorted to, and 10,000 carabao were imported from Asia to take the places of the ones the small farmers had lost. All these measures promptly served to put an end to the epidemic and the Philippines were once more safe from a live-stock famine.

With the mastery of the secrets of the tsete fly and its fatal bite on live stock, England has set out to render Africa inhabitable to horses and cattle wherever the English flag floats over it. Anthrax fever is going the same way, as is the fever caused by the cattle tick. Perhaps as much has been done in the direction of rendering the tropics habitable to our domestic animals as has been done for ourselves.

In the generations to come, there can be no doubt that with a sanitary science that is broad enough to reach both man and beast, the great plains of the highlands in the tropics will be converted into vast cattle ranches, where cattle can be brought to the stock cattle stage and then shipped to the temperate climates for feeding and finishing, thus adding to the world's meat supply to the extent of billions of pounds.

THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF THE CHANGE

The discoveries that have brought about this era of control of tropical diseases have a deeper significance than would appear upon the surface. Not only do they bring health and at least a greater degree of happiness to the hundreds of millions of human beings who live in the tropics, but also to the overcrowded temperate zones a prospective relief from the great food shortages that have been impending.

We find the price of meat growing higher every year as the grazing areas of the beef-producing countries have been encroached upon for farming purposes. Each generation finds the corn and the wheat areas of the world growing smaller in proportion to its population, and it has become evident that if humanity is to continue to be well fed it must look to the tropics.

Here, indeed. lies the hope of the world's future food supply. Untold mil

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lions of tons of provender might be raised where now dense jungles of unprofitable vegetation grow. What the United Fruit Company has done with the banana may be repeated with innumerable crops. Banana flour might take the place of wheat flour, and so on down through the category.

Meanwhile, with the restrictions imposed by disease removed, tides of immigration might set into the tropics, populating them with people who would cease to be a drain upon the food supplies of the temperate zones and become, on the contrary, contributors thereto. Tropical deserts may be irrigated, tropical swamps drained, tropical jungles. tamed, and millions of acres of the richest land on earth added to the productive areas which feed and clothe the world. These times are coming not rapidly, but with a stride certain and inevitable as the world's population is increasing.

And what benefits they must bring to the race! New blood in the tropics is needed. The suns of centuries have burned out much of the initiative, the easy methods of gaining a livelihood have taken out much of the thrift, and the lazy ways of the tropics have eliminated much of the natural love of cleanliness of the people. New blood coming in may change these things to a very appreciable degree, and an even newer and better era of public health may ensue.

A CALL TO DUTY

When one contemplates what the heroes of medical science have made possible, and reflects that they have put into the hands of humanity powerful weapons of knowledge with which to combat our most deadly diseases, he cannot avoid feeling that their efforts will have been partially in vain unless all humanity is induced to aid in the work of capitalizing them.

The world's death rate is probably about thirty per thousand. He who clips just one from that thirty saves more than a million and a half of lives a year. In a single quarter of a century the United States clipped five from its death rate, and if the world could only do as well in the next quarter of a century as the

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United States has in the past 25 years, a population equal to that of the Republic of China might be saved from premature

graves.

Surely such consequences challenge the support of all mankind, and call for an army of volunteers who will go out into the world and preach to the people that cleanliness is next to godliness, and if it lacks the power to produce life, it possesses the power to prolong it. Such a campaign would be fraught with enormous economic, geographic, and humanistic consequences, but it would require long years of patient work. For if we in this enlightened America, with our boasted universal education and Our splendid free institutions, cannot successfully combat such barbaric and unneces

sary diseases as tuberculosis and typhoid fever, it certainly would be too much to expect that the ignorant masses of the tropical regions would accept and live up to these preachings in a few months.

There is one redeeming feature about the governments which lie within the tropics. While in America the people order the government to do and it is done, in the tropics the government orders the people to do and it is done. Whatever else free institutions bring in the way of blessings, they do not yield the same prompt results in protecting the public health that we find when tropical gov

ernments decide to act. And therein lies the most hopeful note in the movement, now a little more than a decade old, for banishing epidemic disease from the tropics.