The Evening Star WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1874.

Evening Star, Issue 3621, 30 September 1874, Page 2

The Evening Star WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1874.

Three things are essential to health, and consequently to comfort and happiness : pnre air, pure water, and wholesome food. Many other things can be dispensed with ; but if these are not secured, the strongest constitutions we unable to resist the consequences,. which may be summed up in the words—disease, shortened and comparatively miserable lives. So conscious is every one of the necessity for these essential conditions that argument is never required to prove their value, although every day’s

experience shows mean’s habitual neg.ect of them. Private houses and public buildings are constructed without the appearance of any intelligent appreciation of the necessity for fresh air. Puny attempts are made in some instances tointroduce it; but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the effort is made in defiance of, not in accordance with, nature’s laws, so that more harm than good is usually the result; and in most other cases pains are actually taken to exclude fresh air, as if it were an enemy instead of the closest friend. Precisely the same may be said of our dealings with water. Like air, when pure it is a friend; but allowed to stagnate and become putrid, it is one of the most malignant sources of disease. On the broad scale, both air and water might be supplied sufficiently nearly pure to be beneficial to health, were it not that, through indifference or ignorance, they are allowed to be polluted. Occasionally this is done for individual profit ; but society will not long tolerate nuisances of that class : men unite to suppress them when they affect the senses, and thus there is at least the chance that the feeling of discomfort may lead to remedying the evil. But, apart from this tendency to correctiveness, both air and water are not, strictly speaking, supplied through human agency. Man may intercept or direct their currents, and charge for the use of his machinery, but they themselves can hardly be said in any case to be merchandise in the same sense as articles ©f food. And it is in that which we buy to eat and to drink that human greed steps in to deceive for the sake of profit. Much attention has been paid in England to the adulteration of food, and an Act was passed imposing severe penalties for vending articles got up for sale and mixed so as to appear of superior quality to their intrinsic worth, or to increase the profit of the manufacturer or retailer. The difficulty experienced is to reach the real delinquent. It seems, at first sight, very hard to punish the man who merely sells a spurious article, while he who manufac-' tures it gets off scot free. But tins appears to be the only remedy. If the retailer would not buy adulterated goods, there would be none prepared ; and if he is not sufficiently acquainted with the articles in which he deals as to be able to distinguish between true and false, it may be very hard upon him ; but it can scarcely be said to he unjust to pay the penalty of his ignocappe. Like every other bene final measure of reform, the Adulteration Act at Home has pressed sorely upon certain classes of tradesmen who have for so many years distributed adulterated goods that they seem to have acquired a vested interest in the sale of them. So keenly has the enforcement of the pro visions of the Act been felt, that they have risen in arms against it, and the singular spectacle has been witnessed at the close of the nineteenth century of a number of tradesmen petitioning Parliament to be allowed to continue to sell goods for what they are not, and to pocket the profits of fraud and deception. In all time there have been trade customs and trade secrets practised with impunity; but we should think that at no period of the world’s history was there less of them than now. Many circumstances tend to improvement in this respect; mainly, that science has provided unerring means of detection. Tire Adulteration Act at Home rendered the appointment of skilled analysts a necessity. Through their labors it has been found that scarcely a single article of human food has escaped mixture with substances more or less deleterious. Teas, in China, have “ been, largely mixed with ! exhausted leaves and ferruginous sand, and others have been too highly colored.” These will no longer find a market in England. Prior to the Act I being put in operation, tea-dealers used ; to “ face” their teas; that iSt, by a process well known in those days, occasionally black teas were converted into green, and low green teas dressed up so as to appear of finest quality. That practice is abolished. As an amendment to the Adulteration Act, the suggestion has been made that “tea should be examined on landing by the Customs,” a plan by which the onus of providing a pure article would be shifted from the retailer to the importer. We do not see so much gain in this, for if retailers understand their business, they will not buy a spurious article, and mei’chants will not import what they cannot sell. We n ;'d not travel through the whole list of articles to point out what to eat, drink, and avoid; but there are some of general use, and the purity of which is so absolutely essential that more than ordinary attention should be given to guard the public against fraud. One would have thought in a country like Otago, with good natural pastures, a good breed of dairy cattle, and a large agricultural population, milk and butter would be at least pure if not abundant and cheap. That they are not cheap should form a good reason why, at any rate they should be pure. But from late proceedings in the Magistrate’s Court, it does not appear that those engaged in dairy farming are one jot more honest in Otago than in London, In that large City, in anticipation of the operation of the Adulteration Act, the dairymen raised prices, and now that they are pretty sharply looked after, they are combining with the grocers, and complaining that the analysts detect their attempts at roguery. They join the others in describing themselves as “injured and persecuted,” because the law compels them to be honest and not to swindle their customers. How netessary analysis is at Home, may be

gathered from the recommendations that “ fraudulent abstraction of cream should be punishable j” *• selling skim milk for new ” should be deemed an indictable offence ; we should add, and so also should mixing skim milk with new, for that this is done in Otago is well known to every experienced housekeeper. As for butter, in winter time it is almost impossible to obtain any that can be termed tolerable. Quan* tities are sold as fresh that have been stored and brought out and mixed with fresh butter. In England, foreign butters are mixed with lard and other fats; -but in Otago, in many dairies, they do not even go to that extent, but apparently adulterate it with flour. No doubt many other articles of large consumption require equally strict supervision, and we trust that the present imperfect laws on the subject will be imperatively enforced, in order that the public may be protected against trade frauds. Strangely enough, at Home, some sympathy appears to be felt in high quarters for those men who, instead of rejoicing thatbecause rogues are punished, they can afford to be honest, desire to go back to the days when they had to compete with men without consciences. • They have not learned that laws are terrors to those who do wrong, and that the competition to which they are subjected when all do right, cannot be so severe as they had to encounter in the days when the effort in the race of trade was to be the most successful cheat.