*

burned sugar, red oxide of iron, orange-berries. Tea would also seem to be, or rather to have been, extensively subjected to the simple cheating process of addition of spurious substances, adding weight and bulk, with such ancillary manipulation as is required to preserve appearances.

"In tea, as imported (says Mr. Phillips), I have found these substances-gum, indigo, a vegetable yellow, Prussian blue, which is rare; carbonate of magnesia, sulphate of lime, and silica. In the tea made up in this country I found many substances

re-dried tea-leaves, other leaves, namely, beech, elm, bastard-plane, fancy oak, and willow, made up to represent green tea with gum, Dutch pink, Prussian blue and indigo, carbonate of magnesia, French chalk, and sulphate of lime. When dried leaves and re-dried tea have been made up to represent black tea, I have found gum just outside the leaf, just coated over with rose pink to give it a bloom. Foreign leaves are broken up very small, and sifted through a sieve of a known size; they are then gathered up by means of gum-water, and rolled up into pieces, sometimes to represent the caper tea, sometimes to represent coarse gunpowder tea; they are then faced over with colouring matter made of the blue and yellow substances I have named, and they are then bloomed by being put into a bag, with a little carbonate of magnesia, French chalk, or sulphate of lime.†

It is remarkable that it is agreed that these frauds are mostly of Chinese origin, and that they are practised chiefly in dealings with green and caper, or black gunpowder teas. Congous and souchongs arrive in England, for the most part, in a genuine state; and it would appear that the manufacture of spurious tea in this country is but a matter of history. It is curious also that, according to Mr. Phillips's belief, it was, like many other malpractices, a Treasury fungus:

"I have no reason (said Mr. Phillips) to believe it exists at the present moment. There were two cargoes of tea wrecked about the year 1840 or 1841. The Treasury granted permission to the underwriters to make the best use they could of this cargo of tea. A party connected with the tea trade washed this tea, and re-dried it on a common kiln used for drying malt.

* Ibid. Q. 2149, et seq. Ibid. Q. 2355.

This

tea found its way into the market at a reduced price. After the cargo was gone, the trade wanted something to lower the price of their tea, and then re-dried tea-leaves were bought up. It then became a trade for parties to go round to different hotels and large houses, and buy them up at 2d. a pound. The re-dried leaves, however, were not sufficient to furnish the quantity required, and then resort was had to British plants."

The indiscreet leniency of the Government in this case seems to have raised a demand for a spurious article, and it was accordingly supplied. The great principle of buying in the cheapest market has its attendant inconveniences, and, applied to the trade in tea, it worked no better abroad than at home, if we may believe the following evidence of Mr. Warington, the chemical operator of the Apothecaries' Company:

"When the Company [E. I.] had a monopoly of the supply, and there was an ad valorem duty, did they employ tasters and inspectors at the ports? - Yes, they had inspectors at Canton always.

"Do you think we had purer teas at that time than we have had since the trade was thrown open ?-There is no question of it.

"Was there no lie tea imported at that time?-Not that I have heard of. I believe it is quite a modern introduction.

"Since the opening of the trade?-Since the demand of the merchant for a cheaper article."§

To use the words of another witness, every substance consumed as food is thus adulterated, more or less. Sugar is rendered bulkier and heavier by additions of potato-flour, tapioca-starch, and all manner of weighty dirt. Bread is made cheaper by admixtures of potatoes; whiter-even that of the League Company-by alum. Lard is but a compound of potato-flour, sal-soda, caustic lime, and salt, in which the adipose matter of the sus scrofa is but a secondary ingredient. And so it goes on to the end of a list which it would be unprofitable to cite at length.

The examples we have given of adulteration for profit are instances of simple cheating. There are, however, varieties of this form of adulteration which, being really no more than the

Ibid. Q. 2346. § Ibid. Q. 397, et seq.

accommodation of the quality of the article sold to the purchasing power of the consumer, cannot properly be included in that infamous category, although some of them have been used as chief chevaux de battaile by the antiadulterators. Thus the reduction of the strength of beer, porter, stout, and gin, by the simple addition of water, though most obnoxious to the English mind, is truly no more than the supplying of a demand for cheap beverages. The preparation of tobacco, too, with sugar, water, or treacle, is not properly an adulteration, but a manufacture of an article in common demand; and in the case of the fragrant weed it is truly remarkable, and we dare say very much opposed to the preconceived opinions of our readers, that scarcely any material adulteration is practised.

At the present moment, according to the belief of Mr. Phillips, the tobacco trade is perfectly free from adulteration; and even the acute eye of Dr. Hassall, aided by his best microscopes, could not detect, in the numerous specimens of manufactured tobacco he examined, a single particle of a leaf that did not belong to the genuine family of the weed. Only now and then, at a fair or race-course, did he ever chance upon even a penny cigar of spurious fabric-contrived rather for ornament than use-a mixture of hay and brown paper. But he by no means loses hope of a more fortunate future; there are natural differences in the composition of varieties of the plant, "so considerable and so varied, as to render it manifest that by imitating its chemical composition, tobacco may be adulterated to a considerable extent, without the possibility of our being able to declare with certainty that it is so adulterated." The hint will probably be acted upon in due season, and with a zeal proportionate to the folly that regulates the fiscal relations of this important trade. The law, a few years ago, permitted the manufacture of spurious tobacco, until the ingenuity of the trade got in foreign substances to the extent of 70 per cent. Having thus inaugurated the practice of adulteration, the guardians of the public revenue turned right round, and forbade the use of

• Ibid. Q. 2417.

any substance but water in the home manufacture of tobacco, thereby directing commercial ingenuity away from adulteration and towards smuggling. Sugar, or molasses, is a necessary ingredient in Cavendish, and as its employment within the United Kingdom is forbidden, and easily prevented, the ready-made foreign article, which is subject to a prohibitive duty of 9s. 6d. a-pound, is plentifully smuggled, and can be freely bought in ounces at prices from a third to a half below the amount of custom supposed to be paid upon it. So curious and noteworthy is the perseverance of governments and philanthropists in opposing their own ends and in guiding the natural appetites of the objects of their financial and benevolent care into mischievous and often destructive courses. The ruling passion of those respectable parties prescribes a continual warfare of especial activity against those practices which man, savage or civilised, universally adopts for the solace of his cares, and with the constant result of converting them, by their meddling, into agencies of dire moral and physical evil.

"The pipe, with stem of lily white
In which so many take delight,"

is laid hold of by Chancellors of the Exchequer as an instrument of taxation, and doubtless a fit one; it is counterblasted by moralists. But the inordinate taxation with which the one hopes to fill the Exchequer, and the other to "cleanse the foul body of the infected world," has no other effect than to poison the fumes inhaled by the smoker, or to teach him, when he takes tobacco, not to reflect tranquilly upon the similitude of his own brief and frail existence in the "ashes, dry and white" of the briefly-burning Indian weed, and in the clay " broken with a touch;" but to spend those contemplative moments in compassing and imagining by what means he may most surely circumvent the exciseman and fill his pouch with honey-dew, or indulge in the illicit pleasure of a genuine Havanna, without violating his conscientious sense of frugality. Well nigh the whole of the male inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland are made smugglers by laws, which do not re

strain smoking, but diminish the revenue. By like restrictions and fetters upon the manufacture and sale of beer and spirits, the population is subjected to a continual process of poisoning, and a numerous class of respectable tradesmen is strongly tempted, almost forced, to the commission of the crimes of fraud and adulteration. In London, at least, and probably in all the large towns of England, it would seem to be certain that tampering with the common beverages of the people is almost universal; and although these practices are to some, perhaps even to a considerable, extent merely, as we have said, the accommodation of supply to the purchasing power of the consumer, by harmless dilution, still there can be no doubt that there is a considerable amount of cheating in the making up of drinks, fairly chargeable against publicans.

All the witnesses agree that the dilution of beer, porter, gin, &c., is balanced by admixtures of substances designed to restore their colour, taste, or apparent strength; but although there is testimony to show that such substances as sulphate of iron (copperas), cocculus indicus, and even exhausted tobacco, have been added to beer with those views, the weight of testimony goes to prove that the ordinary forms of fraud are of a less dangerous character, and that the substances commonly used in adulterating beer are sugar, treacle, salt, grains of paradise, quassia, gentian, camomileflowers, and coriander-seeds, all harmless in their nature. So likewise, in the making up of gin, the articles used are rarely of a noxious kind, and may more properly be called "flavourings" their trade-name-than fraudulent adulterations; and, touching our own national beverage, Mr. Phillips tells an anecdote which includes a moral at once reassuring and warning: "A gentleman in the north of Ireland, who drank his fourteen or sixteen glasses of toddy in an evening, became very ill. He would persist in the belief that it contained corrosive sublimate; he sent us up a sample; we examined it, and it was perfectly pure."* There is, we believe, but little noxious adulteration of any sort practised in Ire

* Ibid. Q. 2284.

land; but the fact furnishes no better reason for drinking a pint of whiskey of an evening, than is furnished by the illness of the northern gentleman, for the total prohibition of a cheerful and moderate glass.

The second species of adulteration includes varieties of a kind infinitely more mischievous to the public than any commonly to be found in the category we have just been considering; and yet, strange to say, the mischief is done at the bidding of the consumer. A great number of articles of food are coloured, flavoured, or perfumed, often with noxious, and sometimes with highly poisonous substances, with no intent on the part of the manufacturer or dealer to obtain a fraudulent profit, or even to produce a cheap commodity, but simply because customers will not be contented with the sensible qualities of the unsophisticated article. Instances in point are supplied by pickles, sauces, confectionery, snuff, and, we may add, bread, tea, gin, and many other subjects of the adulteration for profit. Thus the wholesale manufacturers are forced to imbue their pickles and bottled fruits with a strong dose of verdigris before they can insure their sale; and no one will buy essence or paste of anchovies, or lobster, shrimp, or tomato sauces, unless they are reddened with rusty iron clay. Crosse and Blackwell's "practice with pickles for the last thirty-five years has been to use copper vessels in boiling the vinegar; it requires the vegetables to be scalded first, and then they remain in the vinegar two or three days, so that the vinegar takes up a portion of the copper. The same thing is done two or three days afterwards, and is repeated till the vegetables become of a green colour."t It was certainly not the manufacturer's fault that his customers thus chose to eat and drink their own destruction. Mr. Blackwell "often wondered he had no complaints, because, when a gooseberry pie was cut, it appeared an unnatural green." The customers, nevertheless, ate on, and even fashionable London clubs liked their anchovy sauce best when made bright and handsome looking" by the trituration in every one hundred gallons of it of ten pounds of armenian bole. Nor is

† Ibid. Q. 1563, et seq.

the beggar's brat less influenced by the pride of the eye than the most fastidious of cockney epicures. He, too, will have his morsel of ruin splendid with colour, and swallows his lollipop with a contented mind only when it is coloured with red-lead, chrome-yellow, Prussian blue, or green arsenite of copper. The ratifia flavour, dear to both man and child, is sought for though death may be in the single drop of oil of bitter almonds with which it is communicated to sweetmeat or liqueur. People are so anxious to be poisoned, that they will refuse to drink whiskey until it is made into British brandy by the addition of amylic alcohol, a poisonous oily product of the distillation of raw grain. Oxide of lead, and chromate of lead, and bichromate of potash, which are terrible poisons, are commonly met with in snuff, their presence being, no doubt, the supply of a demand for an inordinate titillation of the olfactory

nerves.

A strong part of the case of the antiadulterators is that which refers to medicinal drugs, and here the common public opinion is entirely with them. The roguery of druggists and apothecaries has been a standing half-jest for time immemorial, and few doubt that it is well nigh whole earnest. Yet the evidence received by the committee does not, we think, warrant that conclusion, without a large reservation; and we venture to add, that some experience disposes us to concur with those witnesses who deposed to a belief, that in this matter the world is somewhat too censorious. There can, indeed, be no doubt that the market contains a large amount of drugs of various kinds extensively adulterated, both in their crude state as imported, and after they have passed through the hands of the drug grinders. There are in London, it is said, certain "druggists, at least one druggist, who would sell any powder you please at 36s. the cwt. ;" and this feat can, of course, only be accomplished by the machinations of grinders, and the regulated use of the Powder of Post, as the sawdust with which these artists clean their mills is termed. There is, also, the sufficient testimony of Mr. Herring, an eminent drug-merchant,

* Ibid. Q. 2768.

that scammony is sometimes imported containing from eighty to ninety per cent. of chalk; the effect of which upon the animal economy is directly opposed to that to be expected from the pure drug; and that opium may be brought in divested of every trace of morphia, which is its active principle. Yet it is plain that the ardour of the chase has led the purists into two errors. They have overlooked the distinction between impurities, accidental and incidental, and adulterations; and they have forgotten that a vast number of samples of manufactured drugs are not intended for medical use, and that many of them are consequently sold, designedly and notoriously, impure, as being in that state cheaper, and equally well fitted for the purposes to which they are ordinarily applied. Thus there are, in fact, no such articles of wholesale import as pure scammony or pure opium, for these substances being juicy exudations from incisions in growing plants, they must be more or less liable to accidental admixtures of dust, insects, and other impurities, during the process of hardening; and as the juice of the poppy will dry only to a certain consistence, opium is always purposely stiffened by working it into a mass with such leaves of various kinds as may be at hand. Again, the legitimate existence of pure and impure drugs is recognised in the common use of a distinctive epithet. There are, for example, the sulphuric acid of commerce, and the carbonate of soda of commerce, and these are sold in the market certainly in an impure, but by no means in a fraudulently adulterated state. They are suited for various uses in the arts, as the phrase goes; and it is the business of the apothecary -who in England, unfortunately, has abjured his proper function-to purify and adapt them for medical use. doing this, in the case of one of the articles we have chanced to mention, it might become his duty to discover that the drug of commerce was largely impregnated with a deadly poison. Some few years since, it entered into the wise head of the King of Naples to impose an export-duty upon the sulphur which England had been in the habit of obtaining from his volcanic

† Ibid Q. 1480, et seq.

In

realm. It is an ill wind blows nobody good, and a little bit of luck was blown to Ireland by this breeze. Shares in the Cronebane mines forthwith began to look up, for in them abundance of pyrites lay waste, which before long was made to yield sulphur enough to ease the market which Neapolitan cupidity and folly had tightened. But the sulphuric acid or vitriol made from this sulphur contained so much arsenic as to render it altogether unfit for medical use, although it in no way deteriorated it for employment in many arts. The article was certainly impure, but it would be absurd to say that it was adulterated. Nevertheless, this example proves the gravity of the subject; and it is truly a very serious matter that a valuable life might be sacrificed through an English druggist's ignorance of the existence of Cronebane, and of the little episode we have just related. Something infinitely more valuable than life was very near being made away with in that manner, only the other day, when a link in the chain of proof that a gentleman was the murderer of his wife was only broken by the discovery that arsenic, supposed to have been employed in the deadly work, was really a constituent of the accusing doctor's muriatic acid test. We by no means, therefore, wish to make light of this portion of the subject of adulteration, and we hope to have a word or two more to say upon it before we conclude.

But now a question naturally presents itself, as to how it comes, that mortal Englishman survives to tell or to hear thus how

"Death in every form surrounds us."

With poison in every mouthful of necessary food, poison in every appetising condiment, poison in the convivial cup, poison in the medicament trusted to for the restoration of health; it would seem as though the King of Pontus himself must have succumbed under that deadly cumulation. If we were to attach the same degree of credit to the testimony of the purists, touching the general prevalence of the practice of adulteration, as we certainly do to their particular instances

of it, we should be forced to admit, that the mariner with

"Fire on the maintop, fire on the bow,

Fire on the gundeck, fire down below,"

enjoyed a condition of tranquil and secure existence compared to that of the Londoner girt with poison. If such were the unavoidable conclusion that must be drawn from the facts stated in recent publications on the subhappy in our provincial ignoranceject, well might our friend warn us— against perusing them. But we have read them carefully without such a conclusion having been forced upon our mind, and we will shortly impart to our readers some of the grounds of the confidence we have happily regained.

In the first place, then, we find a general unanimity of opinion to exist upon two points-First, that with the exceptions of water and air, it is perfectly possible, nay easy, even in London, to procure every article of food, drink, or physic, pure and good of its kind; and, secondly, that the origin of the evil is cheapness. Adulteration is but a phase of that calico civilisation, a distinctive feature of which is a genteel preference for motley wear, flimsy but brilliant, instead of plain linsey-woolsey, warm and homely. Both these propositions are deducible from the testimony of all the witnesses, and by some of them they were put directly, with great plainness and force. Thus we find in Dr. Hassall's reports on coffee, which contain, we may say, the case for the prosecution, a list of eleven shops at which perfectly genuine ground coffee may be had at fair prices; while he must indeed be a simpleton who would not expect to be cheated at establishments offering a half-pound canister of cafe de la flavour Francaise, or the true Parisian coffee -a beautiful compound-for sixpence, and no charge for the canister. Indeed this article, although placed in the front of the battle, furnishes the strongest ground for hoping that the demon of adulteration is not altogether so black as he has been painted. Coffee can readily be procured, in small quantities, of pure quality; and when mixed, it is almost exclusively with