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13
piece of useless legislation, and destined like its predecessors to be
bound up with many other Acts of Parliament in some large folio,
located on the top shelf of the magistrate's library, never possibly
to see the light of day, nor even to be a subject of reference.
I felt strongly it was my duty to render it, as far as possible,
a means of preventing the dishonest tradesman robbing the
poor man of his money, and the rich and poor alike of their
health. Holding this view, that adulteration is an iniquitous
system, demanding from the public with more than the urgency
of a highwayman, not its money or its life, but its money and
its life, I hail this Act with no little pleasure, believing it may
prove to be a great benefit to the community. It is I consider a
matter for congratulation that almost the first prosecutions under
the Act were prosecutions instituted by your Vestry. This will
show that you have, at any rate, not desired, as some seem to have
desired, that the Act should be the same lifeless corpse its
predecessors proved. But I am equally certain of this, that this
Act needs, and must before long receive a considerable amount of
very careful revision, and that at present there are some marked
omissions and defects to which I should earnestly desire to draw the
attention of the authorities. And one is the great need in the Act
of a definition of adulteration. In the public mind, adulteration
seems to imply the addition to an article of one of less value. Thus
a sad confusion exists between the words adulteration and addition.
They have no relationship whatever. Adulteration means the
defiling an article, no matter how the defiling is effected: it may be
(1) by addition, as when water is added to milk to increase its bulk,
or (2) by the subtraction of the active principles or principal
constituents of an article—as when cream is removed from milk,
thereby lessening its nutritive value, or when dried, used-up, secondhand
tea leaves are sold as genuine—or (3) adulteration may even
be the addition of one article to another, although the article added
is infinitely more valuable than the article to which it is added. In
this sense, a great English writer speaks of the addition of gold to
brass as an adulteration of the brass.
Again, the Act being a severe one, (and nothing but a severe
one would meet the case), it seems to me desirable that the Analyst
should, in no case, know from whom the article submitted to him