OLEOMARGABIKE. 647 



SATURDAY, March 24, 1900. 



The Committee on Agriculture this day met, Hon. James W. Wads- 

 worth in the chair. 



STATEMENT OF MR. JAMES HEWES, PRESIDENT OF THE PRO- 

 DUCE EXCHANGE OF BALTIMORE AND VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE 

 NATIONAL DAIRY UNION OF THE STATE OF MARYLAND. 



Mr. HEWES said : 



I was going to say, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, that there are two 

 classes of audiences to whom it is pretty hard to speak. One is an 

 audience of children and the other is an audience confessedly at vari- 

 ance with the ideas of the speaker, and I am now speaking to these 

 latter 



Mr. ALLEN. How do you know that? 



Mr. HEWES. From what I have heard you gentlemen say. 



The CHAIRMAN. We are all amenable to reason. 



Mr. HEWES. I hardly hope to convince you, and I only want to speak 

 a few words, particularly for the first clause of this bill the first sec- 

 tion of this bill, known as the Grout bill. You will pardon me if I recall 

 a little history connected with the oleomargarine legislation in the 

 Houses of Congress, as well as in the States. I began to fight against 

 oleomargarine twenty- two years ago. I wrote the first law which was 

 passed in the State of Maryland, and at that time we wanted to regu- 

 late the sale of oleo because we did not fully appreciate the effect of 

 the introduction of it, which at that time was only supposed to be a 

 plaything. 



Oleo, as you know, was the outgrowth of a necessity at the time of 

 the siege of Paris, and when it was introduced here and went into the 

 Patent Office, and the inventor received the patent for making it, no 

 one supposed it was ever to be an attack upon the butter interests 

 of the State and be of such great importance as it has grown to 

 be; no one did. Therefore we had regulating laws throughout the 

 country, and we tried to regulate the sale and tried to compel them to 

 sell oleo for what it was; but it was sapping the morals of the country, 

 and, as one of the Commissioners of Agriculture here said before the 

 committee in 1886 he spoke altogether as to the morale of the sub- 

 jecthe said it was corrupting the morals of the people, and we veri- 

 fied his statement, because we could see in Maryland women and chil- 

 dren out on the street selling this stuff', and when they were arrested 

 for selling and asked where they obtained it, who sent them there, they 

 did not know anything about it, and we would have to let them go. If 

 they were successful and were not arrested those people would come 

 in and take the proceeds of the sales, and so it went on until the year 

 1886, when we appeared here for the purpose of having Congress exer- 

 cise its police supervision, and of course we could only come to Con- 

 gress and ask for a revenue measure, and, as the late lamented Mr. 

 Dingley said to me only a year or two ago, "Mr. Hewes, you know well 

 enough that was a ruse of yours to get this thing into Congress under 

 the head of a police measure by drawing a revenue to the Government," 

 but we knew what we were talking about. 



We said to the Congress of the United States, "If you will impose 

 this tax for the purpose of a revenue provision, which is always jealous 

 and seeking where it can find something to put into the Treasury; if you 

 will do that, then we believe these people will be deterred from doing 



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