OLEOMARGARINE. 217 



ferent interests from Philadelphia and Pennsylvania represented here. 

 Those interests are the creamery men, the wholesale dealers in butter, 

 the farmers, and the retail dealers. If your committee will permit, I 

 would like to suggest that you allow us a certain time, and let each 

 of these gentlemen, in five or ten minutes, give the facts from the 

 point of view of his own specialty. Then I, as attorney, will round 

 up the matter in such time as you will permit me to occupy. 



The ACTING CHAIRMAN. And how much time will you want altogether ? 



Mr. KAUFFMAN. I think we ought to have at least an hour and a 

 half, Mr. Chairman. 



The ACTING CHAIRMAN. That will be agreeable. 



Mr. KAUFFMAN. Mr. Chairman, if you will permit me I will say, as 

 I stated before, that we have four different interests from Pennsylva- 

 nia here represented. Each one of these interests will be represented 

 by a speaker, who will occupy, say, about ten minutes of time, and 

 who will show how this bill affects his special interest, and why that 

 special interest desires the passage and enactment of the bill. 



The first speaker will be Mr. Habecker, of Philadelphia, a wholesale 

 butter merchant. 



STATEMENT OF JOHN J. HABECKER, BUTTER MERCHANT, PHILA- 

 DELPHIA, PA. 



Mr. HABECKER. 1 have not much to say, gentlemen. I am not an 

 orator, nor am I a paid attorney. I have been in the butter business 

 about twenty-one years, and have gone through this whole controversy 

 from the beginning to the end, and I understand that this. Grout bill 

 is for the purpose of compelling the manufacturers of oleomargarine 

 to sell it for what it is. 



That is all we desire. We are not afraid of honest competition in 

 oleomargarine or anything else that may come on the market. But 

 our experience has been, from the beginning, that these men who 

 manufacture oleomargarine, and the men who sell it, do it in a way to 

 deceive the public into buying it. In all my experience I know of 

 only a very few cases where people have bought oleomargarine know- 

 ing what it is, except in the case of boarding-house or hotel keepers. 



In the very beginning, allow me to say that we come from a city and 

 a State where we claim that we have the finest butter in the country 

 that is, Philadelphia and the State of Pennsylvania. Let us take the 

 county of Bucks, for instance. There it has been the custom for years 

 and years for the people to make their dairy butter up into round 

 prints and pack it up in a certain way, and the people have been 

 accustomed to using their butter in that way. Now, these oleomar- 

 garine dealers (who, from what I can gather here and from the evi- 

 dence that I have heard at different times, are trying to make you 

 believe that they are honest in their dealings and that they want to 

 have their goods sold for what they are) made up their product in 

 semblance of Bucks County dairy prints to suit a certain class and ship 

 them into our market. They know at the time that they are making 

 it into that style of print in order that they may aid and abet and help 

 the retailer of oleomargarine to sell those goods for what they are 

 made to imitate and counterfeit. 



Then we have another section of our State, up in Bradford County, 



