IT is evident that the virus of greed runs riot in the blood of most men in these degenerate days.
What will men not do to wrap their greedy fingers around the infatuating dollar? Society has instinctively recoined an old word into a new use in order to express in a nutshell the multifarious illicit methods devised for indulging its passion for coin. That word is GRAFT. No other word is to-day used more flippantly by all classes of persons, from babies to octogenarians.
Of all forms of graft, however, none is more essentially diabolical, more out-and-out wicked, than that of adulterating the foods, drinks, and medicines manufactured to sell to the consuming public. The medico-scientific world is frantically pursuing the menacing microbe into its last hiding place, and has almost succeeded in putting the fever germ into permanent quarantine. With unflagging zeal our doctors vaccinate, inoculate, and make immune. They mend broken skulls, replace a missing stomach, and disentangle a knotted intestine. But we practically undo all this by unwittingly eating or drinking some adulterant just as fatal, in time, as a sword-thrust.
Despite the laws that society has enacted in order to safeguard health and life, this most odious of all the forms of commercial fraud is everywhere prevalent. In reference to the crime of food adulteration an eminent publicist recently wrote: "Fresh fruit and meat 'on the hoof' so far defy adulteration; but aside from these there is little which man consumes of the purity of which he can be entirely sure." The investigations conducted by the Federal Bureau of Chemistry of the Department of Agriculture, relative to the adulteration of foods and medicines, have led to the most surprising revelations respecting the extent and character of this nefarious practise. The head of the bureau, Dr. Wiley, alleges that "there is scarcely an article of food which has not been 'doctored' for fraudulent purposes." As long ago as 1894, Mr. A. J. Wedderburn, a special agent of the Department of Agriculture, who made a searching investigation into the whole subject, reported that the people of the United States paid $1,125,000,000 each year for the elements of adulteration which they consume in their food. This total, stupendous as it is, does not include the adulterations in malt and spirituous liquors, tobacco, drugs, and the horrors of patent medicines.
Impure Milk.
Even milk, a food indispensable to infants and to many invalids, is adulterated to an extent incredible to those who have not kept themselves informed on the subject. In the city of New York, during 1902, of 3,970 samples of milk taken from dealers for analysis, 2,095, or nearly 53 per cent., were heavily adulterated. In the state of Ohio, during the year 1903, the official chemists found that more than one-fourth of all the milk that they had time to analyze, was adulterated with that vile stuff known as "formaldehyde." These instances serve to illustrate the extent to which the lives of innocent children and helpless invalids are everywhere put in jeopardy, and all from motives of sheer greed.
In the very teeth of drastic laws against the "doctoring" of butter, there are scores of preparations purporting to be butter that are still sold in enormous quantities throughout the country. Of fifty-eight samples of stuff sold as butter, inspected in 1899, in Ohio, fifty proved to be oleomargarine, four to be adulterated, and two to be renovated, butter. Of the entire lot not one sample met the standard test. There are factories in various parts of the United States devoted exclusively to the manufacture of "renovated butter." Their agents frequent all the large markets for the purpose of buying up the refuse butter from the commission men and retailers, "taking stale, rancid, dirty, and unsaleable butter in various degrees of putrefaction; this refuse is put through a process of boiling, straining, filtering, and renovating, and is finally churned with fresh milk, giving it a more saleable appearance." The effect is said, however, to be only temporary, as in a few days the stuff becomes rancid, giving off a frightful odor. For this reason it is sold to dealers having a large trade, who will dispose of it quickly, for, if it is not consumed at once, it can not be used at all unless it is again renovated.
As a result of the researches made by the Municipal Pure-Food Laboratory of San Francisco, it is definitely known that nearly sixty per cent. of the honey sold in the Pacific coast markets is largely composed of glucose. A slightly smaller proportion of maple syrups and of molasses is freely mingled with the same adulterant, plus an admixture of salicylic acid as a preservative. This acid is a poison. A very large proportion of the jellies and of the evaporated creams is filled out with a goodly percentage of starch, with borax thrown in as a preservative. The same authorities further inform us that the manufacture of candies is made immensely profitable by the use of glucose in the place of sugar. Gelatine is almost universally used in the making of ice-cream, and more than five-sixths of the ice-cream analyzed contained borax. In several instances the cream was found to contain even wood alcohol, a rank poison.
Baking-powder.
A popular brand of baking-powder, which has been widely advertised and sold in large quantities, was found, under analysis, to contain thirty per cent. of pulverized rock. Chemical analyses have also laid bare the unsavory truth that most of the cream-tartar of commerce contains large admixtures of starch, phosphate, calcium, acid, and gypsum. The various flavoring extracts are equally deceptive in their composition. Tonka beans, a dangerous poison, artificial coumarin, and glycerole are extensively employed in making extract of vanilla. Of eighty-six samples of the different brands of lemon extract for sale in one of the states, Prof. R. E. Doolittle found that forty-four of the brands contained no oil of lemon whatever; only eight contained more than five per cent., and all except six were colored with coal-tar dyes. It should be remembered that the rules of the United States Pharmacopeia admit of no coloring matter except what can be effected by the use of lemon peel. Its rules further require that lemon extract shall contain no ingredient except the oil of lemon (five per cent.) and pure alcohol.
Canned goods are notoriously sophisticated. Poisonous drugs are used to give a pleasing color to these wares, as well as to insure their preservation. The manufacturer knows that salicylic acid arrests fermentation in canned fruits and vegetables, and borax in canned meats, and therefore he uses them without stint, as long as he is not molested by the officers of the law. These drugs also arrest digestion in the human stomach, but that is a detail with which the dealer does not concern himself, his business is to corral dollars, even at the cost of human health and life.
Canned peas are freshened into a vivid green by use of a positive poison, sulphate of copper. Prepared meats and codfish are preserved with boric acid, another drug altogether inimical to the health of the consumer. An additional chemical poison is employed to intensify the natural color of preserved meats.
The ground coffees of commerce are virtually all more or less adulterated—the most common adulterants being roasted wheat hulls, bran roasted peas, the husks of coco beans, and adulterated chicory. One interesting sample, analyzed in 1900, by the Ohio authorities contained ingredients in the following percentages: Sand, 7.5; sticks, wood, and husks, 2.59; pods, 1.56; ground beans resembling coffee beans, 5.93; other foreign substances, 70.21. The remainder was actually coffee!
In a late number of the San Francisco Argonaut, the editor informs his readers that "out of one hundred and thirty-nine decoy prescriptions sent out by the State Board of Pharmacy to Chicago druggists to be filled, twenty-three contained no trace of the drug called for, sixty-six were eighty per cent. impure; ten were twenty per cent. impure; nine, ten per cent. impure; and only thirty-one were pure." In San Francisco the agents of several reputable chemical firms have been quietly scrutinizing the adulterants offered under time-honored names to the unsuspecting public, and the findings have been anything but creditable to the dealers. The aforesaid editor makes the astounding statement that, "Even President McKinley, according to report, was treated, after he was shot, with a drug which the surgeons quickly found was so adulterated as to have the opposite effect to that desired. From the Atlantic to the Pacific the coin-clutching adulterator of drugs has left his trail."
Wood Alcohol.
Physicians declare, however, that the most awful adulteration is that of substituting deodorized wood alcohol, or methyl alcohol, for ethyl alcohol, or grain spirits. The latter costs somewhat more than two dollars a gallon, while the former costs but fifty cents a gallon. The extent of the consequent adulteration is said to be amazing. They tell us that the inevitable result of drinking or inhaling or absorption through the skin of wood alcohol is blindness or death. "No alternative has been discovered. The most noted specialists of this country are at one on this subject, and predict a time when we shall be in the midst of a crowd of sightless, groping, bleary wrecks, stumbling from corner saloon to corner saloon, to get liquor which took away from them the light of the sun, and enriched the unspeakable adulterators at the price of human sight." (This excerpt is from the Argonaut. It is, perhaps, slightly hyperbolical.)
In its recent report, the New York State Board of Pharmacy avers: "Wood alcohol is a very dangerous poison. Its use is known to have caused St. Vitus' dance, paralysis, and total blindness. Even when used externally it is exceedingly harmful."
Dr. Lederle, in 1903, then head of the New York City Health Department, found that nearly fifty druggists were using it, not only in spirits of ammonia, but in tincture of ginger. Acetanilid is known to be a very dangerous heart depressant. But it is cheap; hence it is very extensively substituted for phenacetin, a much more costly chemical. Of three hundred and seventy-three samples of alleged phenacetin bought from druggists in New York, in January, 1903, only fifty-eight were pure. The others were basely sophisticated or contained no phenacetin at all. "Sixty per cent. of the wine made in France," says a noted chemist, "never saw a vineyard, and grapes form no part of their composition." After careful investigation, it has been conservatively estimated that seventy-five per cent. of the whisky sold in this country is a vile compound of cheap alcohol, fusel oil, and various other poisons.
Thus we might continue ad infinitum to illustrate the awful completeness with which the world of trade has become inoculated with the virus of this abominable species of graft. How often we hear it said that we have become a world of traders; but does it not look as tho we had become also a world of swindlers? Well might some modern Madame Roland exclaim, "O Greed, what crimes are committed in thy behoof!" Apropos of the ubiquitous fraud of the mart, Mr. George Horace Lorimer recently delivered himself in the following pungent terms:
There is more than a sinister suggestion in the fact that it has been, and apparently still is, impossible to get Congress to enact pure food legislation. The adulterator of food is, at his best, a thief, and, at his worst, a poisoner, and, at all times, a repulsive specimen of callous degenerate. But he has "influence" enough with the machines of both our parties, in the nation and in most of the states, to secure the quiet smothering of laws against him.7The food adulterator, like so many others of our "respectable"—that is, most disreputable—criminals, thrives through the indifference and laziness of the mass of his fellow-men. But criminal carelessness on the part of purchasers does not excuse or lessen the crime of the adulterator or the crime of every legislator who, by failing to demand his punishment, makes of himself an accomplice in the stealthy crimes of this own cousin to the well-poisoner.
In the 27th verse of Revelation 21, there are named several classes of wrong-doers who "shall in no wise enter into" the city of God. The designation of one of these classes is most significant in this connection. Thus: "Neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or MAKETH A LIE." If the adulterator of foods, etc., is not one who "maketh a lie," who, then, is?
