rdian_
upon this subject, let us hear another organ of the middle-class--I
delight in the testimony of my opponents--let us hear the _Liverpool
Mercury_: "Salted butter is sold for fresh, the lumps being covered with
a coating of fresh butter, or a pound of fresh being laid on top to
taste, while the salted article is sold after this test, or the whole
mass is washed and then sold as fresh. With sugar, pounded rice and
other cheap adulterating materials are mixed, and the whole sold at full
price. The refuse of soap-boiling establishments also is mixed with
other things and sold as sugar. Chicory and other cheap stuff is mixed
with ground coffee, and artificial coffee beans with the unground
article. Cocoa is often adulterated with fine brown earth, treated with
fat to render it more easily mistakable for real cocoa. Tea is mixed
with the leaves of the sloe and with other refuse, or dry tea-leaves are
roasted on hot copper plates, so returning to the proper colour and being
sold as fresh. Pepper is mixed with pounded nutshells; port wine is
manufactured outright (out of alcohol, dye-stuffs, etc.), while it is
notorious that more of it is consumed in England alone than is grown in
Portugal; and tobacco is mixed with disgusting substances of all sorts
and in all possible forms in which the article is produced." I can add
that several of the most respected tobacco dealers in Manchester
announced publicly last summer, that, by reason of the universal
adulteration of tobacco, no firm could carry on business without
adulteration, and that no cigar costing less than threepence is made
wholly from tobacco. These frauds are naturally not restricted to
articles of food, though I could mention a dozen more, the villainy of
mixing gypsum or chalk with flour among them. Fraud is practiced in the
sale of articles of every sort: flannel, stockings, etc., are stretched,
and shrink after the first washing; narrow cloth is sold as being from
one and a half to three inches broader than it actually is; stoneware is
so thinly glazed that the glazing is good for nothing, and cracks at
once, and a hundred other rascalities, _tout comme chez nous_. But the
lion's share of the evil results of these frauds falls to the workers.
The rich are less deceived, because they can pay the high prices of the
large shops which have a reputation to lose, and would injure themselves
more than their customers if they kept poor or adulterated wares; th