NEW YORK MILK COMMITTEE 



facts. Let me rather pass on to a protest 

 mon comparison of milk supplies with water supplies, with 

 its misleading corollaries, and a plea for the far more reason- 

 able use of those closer analogies which exist between milk 

 supply and the supply of some other foods, especially oysters. 

 Public water supplies are almost invariably derived from one 

 or a few large gathering grounds which are comparatively easy 

 of inspection and eventually from huge reservoirs, the protec- 

 tion of the purity of which is comparitively easy. From these 

 reservoirs one or a few great aqueducts, the safeguarding of 

 which is easy enough, convey water to our cities, which are so 

 served by branching and connecting pipes, all leading to one 

 source, that the public shares in common a really common 

 supply. 



But with milk supplies this is never so. The gathering 

 grounds may be a thousand farms upon a thousand hills, and, 

 while from the earth water may flow from a thousand springs 

 fed from the skies, farm lands flowing with milk and honey are 

 unknown even in history, except among the hills of Palestine. 

 In the next place, there is nowhere any one great reservoir of 

 milk or any cluster of a few great reservoirs. There is no 

 great artery or any small number of great arteries bearing 

 milk from such reservoirs to our cities, and finally there is no 

 single common and branching stream carrying through pipes 

 of various size milk, as such pipes carry water to the ultimate 

 consumers. On the contrary, from a thousand or ten thou- 

 sand remote and distant farms a few gallons, more or less, of 

 milk are first drawn from the teats of a domesticated wild 

 animal, often by hands far from clean and under sanitary con- 

 ditions leaving almost everything to be desired. These rela- 

 tively small quantities of milk are then for the most part 

 separately transported from the farm to the railway, and by 

 the railway to the city. Here sometimes united but more 

 often kept apart, after various treatments at the hands of 

 middlemen, they are eventually distributed to the doorsteps of 

 houses, institutions, stores, and other establishments in which 

 further time elapses, giving opportunities for further changes 

 to take place, until at last the milk, or much of it, is swallowed 

 raw, and more or less stale and decomposed, if not dirty or 

 diseased, by the ultimate consumer, perhaps a helpless infant. 



