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OLEOMAKGAEINE. 311 



monopoly of the entire market for their wares, by rendering a competing 

 product so unattractive that nobody would care to purchase it. Do 

 you think that all the workingmen of western Pennsylvania or of these 

 United States (a portion of whom I represent in the Amalgamated 

 Association of Iron and Steel Workers) can afford to pay 35 cents per 

 pound for creamery butter, which is the present price for the first-class 

 article in Pittsburgh Everyone, I think, will admit that all can not. 



If this bill passes, what position are we in? On examination we 

 find that we will have three options, viz: (1) Creamery butter at 35 

 cents, if the conditions are no worse; and I am not sure but that the 

 passage of this bill may make it 50 cents per pound. (2) Colored oleo 

 at 25 cents per pound, on account of the 10-cent tax. (3) White oleo 

 at 15 cents. 



Colored oleomargarine is at present retailed at from 12J to 20 cents 

 per pound. On investigation I am satisfied that most of our people 

 are paying about 15 cents per pound for it, and I can not admit that 

 those who buy it can afford to pay more. I therefore arrive at the con- 

 clusion that they must either find 10 cents per pound more to pay this 

 proposed robbery (for I can not dignify it by the name of tax), or buy 

 and eat white oleomargarine. And this to satisfy the greed of the 

 manufacturers of butter, who think that white oleomargarine is good 

 enough for those who can not afford to pay 10 cents additional for yel- 

 low, or the 20 cents or more additional for creamery butter, or use the 

 off grades of butter now unsalable as food! 



Shall those thus defrauded of what should be their inalienable con- 

 stitutional right be compelled either to wear in their homes, on their 

 very tables, flaunting before the eyes of their children and of those 

 who may share their board, a badge of their poverty, and an emblem 

 of their inability to pay a legalized robbery; or, on the other hand, to 

 contribute from their meager board to the hellish greed of the butter 

 interests, of whom it has been doubtless truly said that they seek to 

 follow the fashion and form a trust, but are deterred by the existence 

 of oleomargarine? 



I believe that every pound of creamery butter to-day is artificially 

 colored. I have been told so by dealers and chemists; and it puzzles 

 me, as a layman, where they get the basis or reason to ask for the 

 exclusion or taxing of color in oleomargarine, when they use it ad 

 libitum themselves. 



It has been said with truth that some oleomargarine has been sold 

 for butter. I do not defend this. Every honest man would condemn 

 it. If there are not laws to prevent it, there should be and would be, 

 and they would be enforced ; but the dairyman and the butter interests 

 have never sought to have passed and enforced anything like that. 

 They seize on every legislative opportunity to try to wipe out the sale 

 of oleomargarine not to regulate it, but to tax and legislate it out of 

 existence. Have not a dozen States, through the immense influence 

 of the butter interests, and their misstatements, in times past, enacted 

 laws utterly forbidding the manufacture and sale of oleomargarine 

 within their borders on the lying and shallow pretense that it was 

 inimical to public health ? And this claim has been seriously advanced, 

 despite the fact that scientists to a man have declared it just as whole- 

 some as butter, and Justice Peckhain, of the United States Supreme 

 Court, in rendering a decision said it was a " notorious fact " that it 

 was a healthful article. 



New York had such a law on her statute books for years, as had 

 Pennsylvania from 1885 to 1899. Now we have a color law. Our first 



