The Agricultural Department has inaugurated a war on rats, not
as a preventive of the plague or on account of health, but
because of the great loss produced in the country by rats, and
especially to farmers and producers. The department claims that
a rat eats sixty cents’ worth of grain a year, and that the
actual destruction caused by them amounts to over one hundred
millions of dollars a year. The extermination of rats will be
a great undertaking. Yet it could be accomplished by national
effort were it not for the new supplies brought by ships. It
is believed that by proper regulations even this supply might
be cut off, or the rats killed before spreading. It would cost
only a small part of the one hundred millions of dollars to
exterminate the rat. The expenditure of ten millions under
national authority would be economy.
There are moral wastes comparatively more destructive than the plague
of rats, that all men should join in exterminating--the saloon, for
example.
(3441)