The second reading of the Contagious Diseases (Animals) Bill was
carried on Monday night by a very great majority,-157 (319 against 162), in a House not very well attended, for so important an occasion. Moreover, only twenty-six Members paired, so that about one hundred and fifty Members must have been absent altogether from the division. Mr. Dodson made a most weighty and effective speech against the Bill, while Sir H. Selwin-Ibbetson closed the debate, in a speech of which the most effective illustration,—a story of the importation of foot-and- mouth disease from abroad into the herds of a gentleman, Mr. Preston, who was compelled by the disaster to sell off all his stock,—was simply a blunder. In Thursday's Times appeared a letter from Mr. Preston to say,—first, that the foot-and-mouth disease, from which his cows suffered, was not imported from abroad, and broke out before the arrival of the foreign animals to which Sir H. Selwin-lbbetson bad ascribed it ; and next, that this attack of disease was not in any respect his motive for selling off his stock :—" I continued to keep them," writes Mr. Preston "for two years after that occurrence, and only dis- continued doing so because I found that the London wholesale dealers took all the profit, and left me all the loss." Such is the truth concerning one of the most effective illustrations produced by the Government of the merits of their Bill. And such, too, we believe, is the true character of the great majority of the evidence on which they rely for substantiating their case. However, in Committee we shall see many voting against the Government, who voted with it on the party issue.
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