VERMONT DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 123 



filled cheese factories were in full blast in Wisconsin. Within six months 

 every factory had been driven out of business. 



Hon. S. A. Cook, Congressman from my State, introduced a bill 

 into Congress taxing filled cheese one cent per pound and imposing 

 license fees upon retailers, jobbers and manufacturers. It was bitterly 

 fought. In the course of the contest I went to Chicago, bought a cheese 

 labeled "Beaver State Full Cream Cheese," had it analyzed by our 

 state chemist, A. S. Mitchell, secured his affidavit to the fact that it was 

 a filled cheese, took the cheese to Washington and placed it upon the 

 table of the Committee on Interstate Commerce shortly after an at- 

 torney for the filled cheese interests had finished an argument in 

 which he claimed that filled cheese was honestly labeled and sold for 

 exactly what it was. The ob ect lesson presented of a filled cheese 

 labeled "Full Cream" was rather damaging to his case. It is proper 

 to add that one of the members of the committee expressed his sur- 

 prise that the cheese was solid. He said that he had supposed that a 

 filled, cheese was a cheese with the inside cut out and the space filled 

 with newspapers and old shoes. I discovered then, as I have observed 

 since, that members of Congress do not know everything. 



The pure flour law was passed because corn flour was being mixed 

 with wheat flour and that wheat flour was being further adulterated 

 with white earth shipped from the southern States in carloads. Adulter- 

 ation of this article had become so common that the National Millers' 

 Association was up in arms. Our foreign trade was threatened. The 

 President of the Millers' Association testified before the Congressional 

 committee that unless Congress taxed adulterated flour he would be 

 compelled to make it himself to hold his trade: that the lower prices of 

 his dishonest competitors were robbing him of his customers and that 

 in self-defense he must make as cheap an article as anybody. A law 

 was passed taxing mixed flour four cents per barrel. The tax was 

 nominal, but the law required branding, which enabled purchasers to 

 know what they were getting. Letters from great flour firms in 

 Germany, France, England, Holland and Belgium published in the re- 

 port of Senator Mason's food investigation committee in 1900, indicate 

 strongly the great benefit of the law in its effect upon our flour trade 

 abroad. The amount of flour exported in 1896 was 10,000,000 barrels. 

 In 1900, two years after the passage of the law in question, our flour 

 exports were 15,000,000 barrels, and last year they reached a total ol 

 20,000,000 barrels. Adulteration of flour with North Carolina white 

 earth has been stopped and the mixing of flour greatly diminished. 



Aside from any moral question, it pays to be honest. 



The oleomargarine law of 1900 increased the tax upon oleomargarine 

 artificially colored to resemble yellow butter from 2 to 10 cents per 

 pound. It diminished the tax upon uncolored oleomargarine from 2 

 cents to J4 cent per pound. It increased the burden upon the fraudulent 

 imitation. It diminished the tax upon the legitimate article. Retail 

 licenses for dealers in uncolored oleomargarine were cut from $40 to 



