10 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN’S ASSOCIATION. 
to day as American citizens under the time-honored privil¬ 
ege of associating ourselves together for the purpose of 
spending a few hours in social communion and mental im¬ 
provement. 
The year now passed has been one replete with many in¬ 
cidents of deep and abiding interest to the dairymen of 
this country, and especially so to those of Illinois. 
In the early part of last season or that of 1879 some of 
the products of the dairy were put upon the market and 
sold for little more than a nominal figure. Then went up 
the cry of over-production, and many dairymeri became 
alarmed, and not a few prepared to close their dailies. 
A short time prior to this the United. States prepared to 
resume specie payment, the result of which has been gooa 
money and plenty of it too. You ask what this has to do 
with the dairy interests of this country. Well, let us see, 
money being plenty, every honest laborer who desired to 
work has had plenty to do and good pay for his labor. The 
result of this has been a much larger home consumption of 
both butter and cheese than of yore. 
The evidence of this is in the fact that this country never 
produced a larger amount of dairy products for the same 
• length of time than it has in the present season. While this 
increase of production has been going ati, the exportation 
of butter from January 1, to Dec. 1, 1880, has fallen behind 
that of last year for the same time 7,466,448 pounds, and 
the exportation of cheese has dropped off 4 * Z F ) F 489 pounds 
for the same time, and yet there has been no glut of the 
markets of either of these articles; on the contrary the de¬ 
mand has been so great for the products of the dairy that 
it has stimulated the Frenchman, Yankee, 01 some other 
inventive genius to adulterate good butter and put it upon 
the market as gilt-edge creamery. 
In this adulteration of butter we are informed that 
talc or what is commonly known as soap-stone has been 
used to considerable extent in the U. S. Then to cap the 
climax a \Yestern city known to the world as the largest 
packer of the suilline quadruped have taken it into their 
heads to adulterate butter with some of the pioducts of the 
slaughter-house and give it the euphonic name of suine or 
