MARGARINE.
WHEN by the provisions of the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act, 1881, Parliament solemnly enacted that a man might be his own agent, it was considered that the exhaustive and scientific use of language could be carried no further, and that the art of Parliamentary drafting had reached the goal of perfection. It must, however, be now admitted that if the Margarine Bill, 1887, has not eclipsed even this effort in legislative language, it at least comes very near to so doing. Every one knows how hard it is to define justly and accurately, and with what pain and trouble the Law Courts often search for an authoritative definition of some common word. Surely nothing has ever surpassed, or can ever surpass, the statutory definition of butter contained in the Margarine Bill, 1887. In this Bill, it is enacted that " the word ' butter' shall mean the substance usually known as butter ;" an explanation which forcibly reminds one of those tantalising definitions in short dictionaries, which have a tendency to run into the form, —" a substance so called," or, " the flower of that name." It is true the statutory definition of butter goes on to qualify "the substance usually known as butter," as " made ex- clusively from milk or cream, or both, with or without common salt, and with or without the addition of colouring matter," and in so doing rises to a pastoral exactness highly creditable to the Legislature. Without delaying to inquire whether the phrase " with or without common salt" does not leave a very large loophole, or to raise the question whether butter made, not with common salt, but with some other form of chloride of sodium, would be within the Act, it is in this con- text interesting to compare the manner in which the French draftsmen managed to define butter when the Assembly tried its band at margarine legislation. The definitions are amusingly characteristic of either nation. " Batter," rune that of the French in the expose des motifs attached to the Bill, "is a nutritious substance, the use of which plays a leading part fan tree grand rile) in domestic economy." Surely the laboured
clumsiness of English official language on the one hand, and the fatuous pomposity of French on the other, could not be better illustrated.
The battle that has raged during the last few weeks round butter and its substitutes, and over the burning question whether imitation butter shall bear the title " batterine " or "margarine," "in printed capital letters not lees than three-quarters of an inch square," to quote the words of the Bill, has been long and fierce. The contest has known none of the artificial restraints of party warfare,—Parnellitea, Liberal Unionists, Gladstonians, and Conservatives meeting in a deadly struggle over the name which is henceforth to be borne by " all substances, whether compounds or other- wise, prepared in imitation of batter, and whether mixed with butter or not." The principle of the Bill has been admitted on all sides ; but the question whether what is now called butterine can possibly "smell as sweet" by any other name, has evoked the fiercest passions in the farmer's friend and in the champion of the retail trader. Even science herself has been called on to support the supplanters of the dairy, and Sir Lyon Playfair argued, or at any rate seemed to argue, to a wondering House that since " butterine is made from the fat of the ox as batter is made from the fat of the cow," butterine has as good a right to be called butter as butter itself. Yet, though bitter has been the contest that, we suppose, closed in the House of Lords on Friday night, we must not imagine that any very serious political dangers will arise. Other countries have passed through a like crisis, and have survived. For instance, a similar battle, and one conducted with similar fury, was fought out in America, in the Legislature of the State of New York. On that occasion Senator Low delivered the most impassioned of harangues from the point of view of the anti-oleomargarine party. " Outrages [i.e., the manufacture of oleomargarine] not half so great," said Senator Low, "have overturned Empires and brought Binge to the block." Whether this gloomy forecast might have been fulfilled in the State of New York cannot be ascertained, for the Bill advocated by Senator Low passed, and the crisis was averted. Let us hope that we shall be as fortunate in England. Senator Low's great speech, made in April, 1884, was in the same month forwarded by our Minister at Washington to Lord Granville, who was then collecting reports on butter-substitutes from our foreign representa- tives, in order to lay them before Parliament. This oration covers no less than six closely printed folio pages of the Blue-Book, and like Lord Clare's great speech on the Union, is a spoken history of the subject. According to Senator Low, the original inventor of oleomargarine was a Frenchman who, during the investment of Paris by the Germans, looked about for a substitute for butter, and found one by concocting from the fat of beef a product known as "olio." Thence the idea was carried to New York, and the manufacture of the substance which began to be known as oleomargarine assumed very large proportions. By 1884 so great was the trade in oleomargarine, that one-half of what was sold in New York as batter was in reality an imitation, made from "the caul fat, principally of hogs, mixed with oils imported from Italy, and colouring matter." On one occasion, the agents of a Committee of the Senate charged with the investigation of the matter, procured thirty samples of what was sold to them as butter. Of these thirty, ED less than twenty were oleomargarine, and only ten real butter. Senator Low's description of how to make oleomargarine in private was extremely realistic. "At your breakfast in the morning, take &bottle of the lard, or raw fat, pressed out by hydraulic pressure from the gut or caul fat of the animal, generally heated to 125° Fahrenheit ; mix it with a little cotton-seed oil; put in a little salt and annato prepared with potash or soda to colour it, and mix together on your plate ; add a small percentage of natural butter and a little nitric acid, and you have the whole thing." "If," concluded the speaker, "there is a Senator who would like to eat it, I would like to have him arise in his place." Senator Low's gage does not appear to have been lifted, and the oleomargarine men cowered in their places, and said never a word. In the speech of the great champion of the dairy, very little respect was paid to the scientific experts who think " oleo- margarine " wholesome. "I know they will bring chemists to say this thing is not hurtful, that it is wholesome. There was one before our Committee, who said his family ' hankered after it ; but no one believed it." The makers, all except one (declared Senator Low), " loathed it as they would the most deadly poison." Mr. Low ended his speech by an impassioned appeal to the
Senate to save the farming interest from ruin by" this wretched business of mixing vile fats, oils, and acids to counterfeit the great industry of our State." "The live cow cannot," he exclaimed, " compete with the dead hog."
We have perhaps dwelt too long on Senator Low's anti- oleomargarine heroics. Certainly we hive no wish to add his refleotione on the question of whether the butter-substitutes should or should not be allowed to continue to be called butterine, or to be sold as butter. In sober earnest, we believe imitation butter, properly made—and under the existing regulations it is not denied that the product as sold in England is properly made—to be a wholesome form of food, and since it can be produced cheaply, a very useful one for the poorer classes. A certain amount of oil is necessary for a wholesome diet, and since English people do not like taking this liquid, as the peoples of many foreign countries do, but prefer it in a solid state, it is a very good thing that—the price of real butter being too high—there should exist cheap and wholesome substitutes. We are, there- fore, entirely against anything tending to prevent the sale of artificial butter,—but, indeed, this has never been proposed by the wildest advocates of the farming interest. When, however, the dealers in butter-substitutes demand not only the right to sell their product freely, but under disguises which the public are not able to distinguish from real butter, we cannot possibly agree with them. " Oleomargarine " is not butter, whatever Sir Lyon Play fair may say, and should not be allowed to be sold as butter, or ander any name which conveys the impression that the product is, in fact, a form of butter. Now butterine, the name demanded by those interested in the imitation-butter trade, does convey, and is intended to convey, the idea that the pro- duct is a form of butter. This is obvious from the fact that it is argued for so eagerly. The name enables the pro- duct to be ranked with real butter. To its competing com- mercially with the natural product of the dairy we have no kind of objection. It does not matter in the interests of the public whether the oleomargarine manufacturers or the farmers are to profit. What does matter to the public at large is that they should know what they are buying. But this they cannot know unless the law compels those who make and sell artificial butter to label it as such, for it is only an expert, aided by chemical analysis, who can tell the best imitations from the real. It would sometimes seem as if the closeness of the imita- tion is used as a reason against Parliament interfering to make the artificial butter declare itself. If people cannot tell the difference, how are they injured by buying the imitation ? Surely this is a very topsy-turvy way of reasoning. If the imitation could be detected at once by any one, there would be no need for Parlia- ment to interfere. It is because the unaided purchaser cannot distinguish between the two that the Legislature assists him. A man may very reasonably consider artificial butter unwholesome, and, indeed, dangerous to his health. Surely if he has a right to demand that the sale of food shall be regulated (as it is universally admitted he has), the present is obviously a case for such interference. Whether or no the House of Commons, in choosing "margarine," took the best possible name for the pur- pose, it is difficult to say. We are inclined to think that the oleomargarine dealers and manufacturers had a right to claim that any enforced name should show on the face of it that their product could be used as a substitute for butter. " Butterine" was too near, and might too easily be transmuted into butter pure and simple, with the pen or the tongue. "Imitation butter," however, or "artificial butter" might, we cannot help thinking, have met all the difficulties of the case, if it had been possible to provide that the qualifying word, "imitation" or " artificial," should be made as conspicuous as the word, "butter," which it qualifies. " Margarine " also labours under the dis- ability of being the name of another product—a sort of tallow— and those interested in that product regard the adoption of the name in the Bill as an "outrage and insult." We notice that in Thursday's Times, Lord Wemyss asked his brother- Peers to join him in actually tasting samples of margarine and butterine which were to be placed in the Lords' refreshment- rooms. We take it, however, that the margarine to which he invited his fellow-Peers is not this margarine, but the butter- substitute oleomargarine, from which the " oleo " has been dropped. If not, is not the joke somewhat too grim a one even for a Scotch Peer P We cannot help thinking that on all grounds a better name than "margarine" might easily be dis- covered by Parliament in its wisdom.
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