perts in such work and must give them sufficient latitude, so that they can take immediate action when necessity arises. To this has been largely due the efficiency of the federal law in very many matters in which the state laws have been conspicuously inefficient.
How many of our seaboard or frontier states have at the present time any system of inspection which will enable them to prevent the importation of injurious insect pests, or how many, even, could proceed to eradicate such pest when actually within the borders of their state when over a few hundred dollars were necessary for its eradication? California is probably the only state having any adequate machinery for such work.
But it is objected that the work of exterminating an insect within a state would be unconstitutional, an interference with the rights of the state, etc. So it would seem and so at first it appeared to the writer, but the present laws of congress concerning the control of cattle and human diseases and the regulation of the importation of noxious animals effectually dispel this objection.
At the present time the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service has charge of most of the maritime quarantine stations and may take charge of any others it sees fit when they are inefficient under state or municipal management. It furthermore may enforce interstate quarantines, or may quarantine any portion of a state and take such measures as it sees fit to eradicate disease in any locality when the local or state health officials, either through lack of legislation or inefficiency, fail to control disease so that it threatens neighboring states. This has actually taken place in several instances. For a full discussion of federal quarantine measures see an article by James Wilford Garner, of the University of Illinois, in the Yale Review for August, 1905, pp. 181-205. At the present time the southern states are petitioning congress for the national government to take entire control of maritime and interstate quarantines, owing to the proved efficiency of the government service in handling the yellow fever outbreak during the past season. Surely there can be no better proof of the desirability of federal control of quarantines than the present attitude of the southern states, for no section of the country has had their experience with quarantines and no section has been more opposed to federal quarantines in the past.[1]
By the Lacey act[2] congress has conferred upon the secretary of agriculture the power to make and enforce regulations to prevent the importation of noxious animals, and this act has now been enforced for five years. In essence the law proposed by the convention of 1897
