THOSE SAUSAGES.

Observer, Volume 7, Issue 163, 27 October 1883, Page 3

THOSE SAUSAGES.

Sausages are the vexata quxstio of the day. All other questions sink into insignificance beside this all-absorbicg, awful problem. Man may live by bread alone, but he cannot live without sausages. He may absorb poison in some secret form of adulteration in everything he eats and drinks, but the climax of the catastrophe is reached when he finds " red bole" in m' 3 sausages. In point of fact, it just bowls him out. Even the butchers have gone into print about the adulterated sausages. " Sairey Harm" now handles the indispensible morning frying-pan with fear and trembling, lest the master should rise from, his breakfast pitted all over with crimson 6pots. Materfamilias fears secret poison in the bole, No one knows when the festive equestrian butcher-boy yells the familiar "Butcher" or " 'Chur," and hands over the links of embowelled sausage-meat to the expectant Sairey, with a nice compliment thrown in gratuituously for the said Abigail, that secret death does not lurk within, that matutinal meal. Yet men take poison in their food and drink in many other ways, and never complain. " Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise."

It is a proof of the laissez faire system, which, more or less prevails in all Governments, that, as wo have reiterated ad nauseam, the " Food and Drinks Adulteration Act " is a hollow sham and delusion. The machinery is there, the means of enforcing the Act is there, but no Ministry that values place and pay more than honesty and the public weal dare enforce it to the letter. The moil and women who live by the adulteration of food and drinks are too numerous and too powerful at the polling booths. It is n^t the business of a Ministry that values votes more than the voters to care particularly about a few pooplD here and thoi-o who may die of slow poison There are clauses in the " Adulteration of Food and Drinks Act " providing for the appointment

ignored. The analyst almost invariably reports that tho wine, spirits, or beer, is beyond all praise, devoid of deleterious ingredients, and all tho rest ■of it. We have a clear recollection of ono analyst who thus reported, but afterwards wasted away and died of deleterious ingredients in the ■whisky which his grateful friends bountifully supplied him with. We forbear to mention tho name. De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

When -will the people understand that this Mammon worship is not the true aim and end of man's noblest destiny — that murder for filthy lucre is murder, whether perpetiated with dynamite, the secret stab of the stiletto, or the poisoned sausage ; and when will men, realising this fact, insist that a G-overnment shall enforce justice and right, irrespective of votes and wealth ?