At the present time a case of this kind would be brought before the Court of Criminal Appeal, and the prisoner would have the opportunity of having the alleged misdirections of the presiding judge investigated, and of putting forward additional evidence—advantages that were not available to the accused in this trial.
CHAPTER XVI
ADULTERATION OF FOOD
National Loss from Adulteration—“Adulterated” Electricity—The Beer Conner—Conflict of Evidence—The Notice Dodge—Preservatives—Standards for Food—Court of Reference—Administration of the Law.
To label the adulterator of food as a criminal would, in the majority of cases, be too harsh a sentence, but in the worst forms of adulteration—those in which food that is positively bad is made to appear good—he more than deserves the title. Although in the larger proportion of instances the actual pecuniary loss inflicted upon the consumer by the sale of adulterated food may be but trifling, the loss suffered by the community collectively through various forms of petty frauds of this nature reaches an enormous total in a year.
Some idea of the extent to which the public is thus defrauded may be gathered from the instructive figures published some years ago by Professor Long in the Nineteenth Century.
In his article it was estimated that 1,400,000,000 gallons of milk were produced annually in the United Kingdom, of which over a third was sold in the form of milk, the remainder being converted into butter and cheese. Assuming that a tenth part of the milk were adulterated by the middleman, the loss to the farmer would represent over £600,000 per annum. There is little doubt but that this calculation underestimates the amount of milk adulterated by the addition of water or by the separation of the cream.
The evidence given before a Select Committee of the House of Commons appointed to deal with the Food and Drugs Acts suggests that probably one-fifth of the butter imported into this country is adulterated, while it is almost impossible to form any estimate of the loss to the consumer from adulterated groceries and from the sale of foreign meat as “best English.”