OLEOMARGARINE. 423 



Senator ALLEN. Almost every little town has some butter dealer, 

 and lie has a little machine by which he takes much of this butter and 

 renovates it, as he calls it. This is true in little towns of 800 or 1,000 

 people. What kind of butter is that, and where does it go? 



Secretary WILSON. The best of ita great deal of it is good but- 

 ter. The best of it is put on the market as second or third grade butter. 

 The very poorest of it, that is beginning to become rancid, is shipped 

 to centers where they manufacture the process article. 



Senator ALLEN. In these little towns and the country surrounding 

 them there is about one good butter maker out of a dozen. 



Secretary WILSON. That is right. 



Senator ALLEN. That good butter is always sold at home sold to 

 private families. 



Senator MONEY. At a big price? 



Senator ALLEN. At a big price. For instance, in my State, where 

 butter in June is only 8 or 9 cents a pound, I pay 20 cents a pound for 

 it the year round. 



Secretary WILSON. Well, factories are established in your State, and 

 they make a tine Elgin brand, using that name as representative, and 

 they get just what it is worth in Elgin, minus the transportation. 



Senator ALLEN. The thing I wanted to call your attention to particu- 

 larly was this: This fine-grade country butter made by the farmer's 

 wife or daughter is all consumed in the little villages where it is made. 

 The great bulk of butter that is shipped out of these little villages 

 either goes through a process of renovation at home I have seen them 

 work it myself; small, cheap concerns or else they are put m barrels 

 and shipped somewhere else. 



Secretary WILSON. That is correct. 



Senator ALLEN. What I want to know is, what becomes of that 

 butter? 



Secretary WILSON. Oh, that is made into renovated butter. Con- 

 gress, in its wisdom, in 1862 provided for experimental agricultural 

 colleges, and in 1887 provided for experiment stations. There is an 

 admirable one started in your State, and there is one in my State which 

 is very near the forefront of anything of its kind in the world. There 

 they train from 100 to 200 young men every winter to make first-rate 

 butter, so that the training of people is overcoming the renovating 

 feature. 



The CHAIRMAN. In our State years ago the country merchants took 

 in a large amount of butter, more than his village trade would take. 

 He then sent the best of it to commission merchants in Boston and 

 New York to be sold. The cracker manufacturers and others would 

 pick up the cheapest of it and dump it into a barrel and treat it in some 

 way, 1 suppose. 



Secretary WILSON. Yes. 



The CHAIRMAN. Now, that is almost a thing of the past. There is 

 no store that I know of that takes in butter enough for its own cus- 

 tomers. It is very rare that they take any of a farmer. They have to 

 buy good butter of a creamery or of first-class dairies. 



Secretary WILSON. Yes. 



The CHAIRMAN. That change has taken place. Dairying has become 

 profitable there, and the only profit is in making a nice article. 



Secretary WILSON. The education of the people along these lines will 

 do away very soon with the renovated feature of butter. The great 

 danger does not come from that. It comes from the imitation of the 

 genuine cows' butter by coloring, so as to deceive the consumer. 



