“Thou Shalt Not Commit Adulteration.”

Northland Age, Volume 1, Issue 15, 22 November 1904, Page 3

“ Thou Shalt Not Commit Adulteration.”

An Eleventh Commandment. It was John Blight, the great British statesman, who said: “Competition is the handmaidiai of fraud and adulteration.” When Bright made this utterance, nearly half a century ago, fraud and adulteration were but in their infancy, but they have now permeated the whole commercial fabric.

I you ask for a linen collar, you get one faked with shoddy cotton; if you ask for a good, heavy, colored shirting, you get one faked with China clay, which is fed into the fabric as it is made and increases its weight by 10 or 15 per cent. •Silk ribbon was never within a mile of a silkworm, and tweed has ceased to mean an honest woollen fabric, and now means a carefully-designed fraud. . If you ask for coffee you get 60 per cent, of burnt chicory; if you ask for mustard it is a guinea to a gooseberry you will get some concocted trash in which flour and aniline dye play an important. part. If you ask for pepper you invariably get a fake, and even the Scotsman’s porridge is adulterated with low-grade pollard. The glass of brandy you drink owes none of its orig'H to the grape, but it is chiefly distilled from potatoes, colored with a little burnt sugar, and flavored with a chemical., essence; and whisky is not distilled from. malt. Manufacturers of cordials, concoctors of bags of mystery called “German sausages,” vendors of milk and other perishables, nearly all use chemical preservatives the consumption of which is always harmful.

If you ask for a pound box of starch you get 14 ozs., and if you ask for a pound tin of jam you are desperately lucky if you get 13 ozs. The |lb. cake of tobacco has shrunk by at least lAozs., and it takes 12 pint-botfcles of beer to make a gallon. The labels on manufactured goods aro also fraudulent. The moment a New Zealand manufacturer starts to put mustard on the market he imitates the labels orr Keen’s or Coleman’s English manufactured goods as near as he dare, and every concoctor of abominable sauce imitates Lea and Perrins’ bottle. Of course, we are told that no harm is meant. We are told chicory in coffee won’t kill you, and that pollard in oatmeal is rather nice, and that 13 ounces to the pound is a recognised custom of trade. It may be, but it shouldn’t be, and all the tricks mentioned herein are tricks of trade, designed to rob the public. Adulteration presses most heavily on the poorer classes, who are more readily tempted to try a cheap article, and there is urgent need for an Act of Parliament which shall make such frauds a criminal offence.

“Thou shalt not commit adulteration” is the eleventh commandment which Parliament should deliver to the manufacturers and merchants of New Zealand.