OLEOMARGARINE. 431 



behalf of the people whom I represent, and of the sentiment of the 

 State which I represent, that we are not here to make any fight on oleo- 

 margarine as oleomargarine under its own form and under its own color. 

 We are here, as Mr. Flanders said, to, if possible, legislate the fraud 

 out of oleomargarine. 



The central argument which our friends on the other side have made 

 here is that if you take the color out of oleomargarine you can not sell 

 it; that you are going to absolutely destroy that industry. I deny the 

 proposition, and I can prove that that denial is made in good faith and 

 warranted by the facts of the oleomargarine business, not only in this 

 country but abroad. 



Some figures were given here this morning by Mr. Wilson with refer- 

 ence to the oleomargarine traffic and the consumption in this country 

 and abroad, and I want to say to you that in Denmark, which is a dairy 

 country, where the Government has used its power to educate its people 

 and instruct them in the business of making good butter, where it is 

 under careful governmental supervision a little country, less than one- 

 half the size of the State which I represent (Wisconsin), with 50,000 

 square miles of territory they export every year into the European 

 markets 130,000,000 pounds of the best butter which goes into the mar- 

 kets of the world, and in that country the farmers buy oleomargarine. 

 I admit it. They buy it. How? They buy it white, the color which 

 nature gives it. Mr. Wilson says they consume 3J pounds per capita 

 over in Denmark, and that we consume 1 pound over here in the United 

 States. Yet Prof. W. A. Henry, of the experiment station of Wiscon- 

 sin, one of the men who has done more to educate the farm sentiment 

 and the farm judgment of this country, perhaps, than any man in it, 

 returned from Europe only a few weeks ago, and told me that he had 

 traveled in Denmark and gone into the stores of that country and 

 studied the laws of Denmark with reference to the manufacture and 

 sale of dairy products and dairy imitations, and he found that in the 

 stores of Denmark, where they sell oleomargarine, they are compelled 

 to sell it on one side of the store and butter on the other side of the 

 store, and that they are compelled to sell that product in the color which 

 nature gives it, which is substantially white. And there in Denmark, 

 where they are compelled to do what the producers of honest butter 

 want the manufacturers of this substitute to do in this .country, they 

 are selling three and one-half times as much to the inhabitants as they 

 are selling here in the United States, manufacturing and selling that 

 product in numerous States in violation of the law, simply because it 

 is in imitation of a more costly and more valuable product. 



I tell you, gentlemen, and I say it in all sincerity, that if I were an 

 oleomargarine manufacturer, conscious of the value which my substi- 

 tute had in the markets of this country, instead of coming to the Con- 

 gress of the United States and demanding as a right that I should 

 have the privilege of coloring my product in imitation of the natural 

 substance of which it is a counterfeit, I would come here and say: 

 ''Gentlemen, regulate the color of my product by national legislation 

 if you will. It is wholesome. The poor people in this country want it. 

 It has its merits. There is a place for it in the markets. We can sell 

 it. We are now under the ban of law in 32 States. We are constantly 

 hampered by prosecutions on the part of State authorities. We are 

 constantly stung by the criticism of honest men upon the character of 

 our business, and we are willing to have the color knocked out of oleo- 

 margarine and put it on the markets of the country and sell it under 

 its own color, and for precisely what it is." 



