NECESSITY OF MAKING GOOD BUTTER. 145 



neglect of the simplest precautions against absorption of taints and the 

 keeping of it at a properly low temperature. 



There can be no good butter if the farmer has not done his part to 

 produce good milk, and if the buttermaker has not done his part to handle 

 that milk in a skillful manner to concentrate its good qualities into the 

 finished product. 



What is the farmer's part in the sale of good butter, now that he has 

 done his part in its production? 



The sale of good butter would be a simple matter if there was not a 

 counterfeit of butter which is cheaply made and which is sold by hundreds 

 of so called "butter" dealers as and in place of pure butter. This thing of 

 selling this counterfeit of butter oleomargarine is easily done by those 

 who prefer the ten cents to fifteen cents a pound profit on each pound to 

 their business honor, because in the great majority of cases the purchaser 

 is not well qualified to discriminate between what is pure butter and what 

 is the counterfeit, and so gives his full confidence to the dealer who thinks 

 little or nothing of so grossly abusing this confidence to serve his own base 

 purpose. 



It is difficult, indeed, for the farmer, accustomed as he is to trading 

 mostly with life time friends and neighbors, to realize how a dealer can so 

 grossly abuse his customers' confidences and so guiltily take from them 

 the value of a good article while giving to them a grossly cheap counter- 

 feit which they would promptly refuse to buy did they but know how they 

 were being cheated. To the honest minded person this is a thing quite 

 inexplicable; and it only can be explained on the ground that substitution, 

 of whatever nature, usually means the replacing a good article with an 

 inferior one, and where the inferior one is difficult of detection well, the 

 morals of some will not stand against it; and this is most painfully the 

 case with the sale of oleomargarine, about nine-tenths of all that is pro- 

 duced being sold to consumers as pure butter or used by them as pure butter 

 at hotels and restaurants. 



The production of oleomargarine has in the past two years reached 

 an amount equal to the amount of creamery butter made in both Iowa 

 and Minnesota, or almost any two of the great butter producing states 

 in the Union. If made and sold as oleomargarine, if offered to the butter 

 buyer as a cheap SUBSTITUTE for butter, no man could or would object, 

 for that would be a legitimate business the buyer and user having the 

 choice of "taking or leaving" it. But when oleomargarine is made a COUNTER- 

 FEIT of butter, and is given to buyers and users who ask for butter 

 and think they are getting butter, paying therefor the price of good butter 

 and NOT the price of a CHEAP SUBSTITUTE, then the industry is an illegit- 

 imate, a fraudulent one, and the people, through their voice in the national 

 government, have the right not simply to ASK but to DEMAND that the 



