FOUL FISH AND FILTH FEVERS. 331 



that similar scandalous frauds have been practiced is well known to medical officers 

 of health. For instance, in Paris, it is stated that till recently dead and diseased 

 animals from their zoological gardens were regularly fetched away in carts, etc., 

 without the knowledge of the zoological aud other authorities in Paris. These mis- 

 cellaneous mixed meats, under varied fraudulent names, were sold and eaten as food. 



The working up of diseased products is a serious source of danger to those em- 

 ployed. It would be cruel, if not criminal, to allow diseased intestines to be made up 

 into sausage-skins, and perhaps even eaten at civic banquets. But what supervision 

 does the corporation exercise when once the putrid filth has left its carts'? Does it see 

 how the manufacturers use up these nauseous abominations and how and where this 

 dangerous refuse is disposed of? 



Surely public attention and action should force their ''sanitary" servants, the 

 municipal authorities of the United Kingdom, to avoid these peculiar and possibly poi- 

 sonous proceedings. Such paid professional bodies should forthwith build aud employ 

 properly constructed local furnaces as the most efficient and economical hygienic 

 means to destroy condemned animal matter, including "fish," its offal and refuse. 



RINCiS AND ROTTEN FISH. 



The Billingsgate ring not alone chains the crushed and indebted fishermen of the 

 United Kingdom in cruel, chronic poverty; it not alone makes the consumer often 

 pay from GOO to 800 per cent or more for the fish than is given to the fishermen, but 

 it provides the public with fish generally more, or less stale or decomposed, and some- 

 times even putrid and poisonous. 



To diminish the market supplies of il fish," so as to artificially keep up the high 

 price of fish, this ring gets fish destroyed at various places along our coast. This 

 Billingsgate ring is the ruin of our national coast and inland fisheries and fishing 

 industries. Already in 1749 it extinguished the Westminster fish market. It caused 

 the failure of the old Hungerford fish market. It strangled the Columbia market 

 even when subsequently taken over conditionally from Lady Burdett-Coutts by the 

 corporation of the city of London. Her ladyship is reported to have lost a large 

 fraction of £1,000,000 sterling, partly because of the unscrupulous opposition to her 

 benevolent schemes by the Billingsgate ring, and also because her public fish market 

 was placed inland without any approach by water. It snuffed out Mr. Plimsoll's fish 

 market at the " Elephant and Castle." It has turned the corporation fish markets in 

 Farringdon street into trading fiascoes. By its clever combination it boycotts and 

 Starves Shad well fish market. 



Save a few favored fortunate virtual monopolists, the fish-traders of the United 

 Kingdom are working hard to gain little or nothing, as the legitimate profits of their 

 toil and trouble tend to tumble into the tills of the Billingsgate ring, who are assur- 

 edly remarkably shrewd " business meu.'" 



In 1880, before Mr. Spencer Walpole, by direction of Sir William Harcourt, the 

 home secretary, holding an inquiry on alleged Billingsgate abuses, the late George 

 Stevenson, a Billingsgate fish salesman, and a popular member of the markets com 

 mittee of the corporation, thus expressed himself in his evidence: 



It would be better that all London should sink than that Billingsgate market should sink. 

 Billingsgate is one of the grandest institutions of the couutry. 



