View report page

1904]
244
stating that all the brandy sold by them was guaranteed genuine brandy
distilled from the wine of the grape.
The decision also had the effect of forcing the importers of brandy,
according to Le Moniteur de Cognac, to require from the Charente firms guarantees
for their English clients.
The trade journals were of course full of the subject, and numerous
correspondents asked them what they were to do. Indeed the scare became
so great that one journal, no doubt moved thereto by a conscienceness that
the methods of the trade were not above reproach, wrote "While the brandy
controversy is in full swing, it seems likely that a similar situation is likely to
arise as regards whiskey. A well informed authority in the trade, reports to
us that prosecutions will at once be commenced by some of the borough
councils against whiskey blenders using large quantities of patent grain spirit
without a description, on similar lines to the brandy case. The broad dividing
line will, of course, be the pot still. Our informant adds, 'I hear privately,
that samples are about to be taken.' By which we presume is meant, samples
of blends which are sold as pure malt, but are largely composed of silent or patent
spirit." *
What an admission of trade dishonesty to be published in a trade paper !
It was well known that rectified, patent, or silent spirit was largely used in
adulterating whiskey, but it was not known that such a compound was
deliberately and fradulently sold as malt whiskey. The writer for once, in his
innocence, supposed that the makers were content to sell it as "whiskey," as
some of them contend, whatever they may think, that such a mixture may be
rightly called by that name. Such admissions as these by an influential trade
journal, naturally suggest to sanitary authorities that it is time that some legal
inquiries were made into the admittedly fraudulent practices of the trade with
respect to this spirit, so much of which, at the present, is of such a character
that its ill results are plainly to be seen in the human wreckage which fills the
lunatic asylums and the hospitals.
The Italics are the M.O.H.'s