foreign trade? The exports of provisions from the United
States during the last fiscal year were in value about
$107,000,000. Those in 1882 amounted to $120,000,000, equal
to a falling off in a single year of $13,000,000. Our exports
of manufactured articles for the last year aggregate
$211,000,000, against $103,000,000, a gain of $108,000,000 in
a single year. It was a reasonable expectation that our
animal exports would have increased in like ratio as the
manufactures, which would have enhanced the value of all
domestic animals and furnished, instead of a mortifying fact,
a proud exhibit.

The causes of a decline are not found in high prices at home
nor in inferior product; rather in suspicions of diseases,
and the clamor of interested parties which led to arbitrary
restrictions, oppressive quarantine regulations, and
forbidding beeves which were ripened for the highest markets
to pass beyond the shambles; and the egress of young immature
cattle on the English pastures. Pork products up to the
Chicago meeting were prohibited by France, and they are
inhibited now from Germany, our long-time valuable customer.
It was their whims, caprices, jealousies, commercial
restrictions and bans which decreased our exports and led the
Commissioner of Agriculture to call the Chicago meeting of
November.

The convention developed facts and was fruitful in results:
That there were solitary cases of pleuro-pneumonia, and
limited to the eastern border States; that Western herdsmen
had just cause of alarm on account of the shipment of young