Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
May,  1909. 
Crude  and  Powdered  Drugs. 
233 
below  the  regular  price  for  standard  goods.  It  must  also  be  remem- 
bered that  if  an  importation  is  passed  by  the  authorities  this  fact  is 
apt  to  be  used  by  the  seller  as  a  sort  of  guarantee  that  it  is  of 
standard  quality.  An  error  in  admission  is,  therefore,  very  likely  to 
result  in  serious  consequences.  If  this  is  true  of  assayable  goods, 
it  is  obviously  far  more  serious  in  case  of  those  for  which  there  is 
no  practicable  standard,  with  the  probability  of  detection  correspond- 
ingly decreased. 
From  this  it  follows  that  importers  desirous,  as  most  of  them 
are,  of  seeing  the  objects  of  the  pure  drugs  law  accomplished  do  not 
show  good  judgment  when  they  apply  pressure  to  secure  the 
entrance  of  an  article  which  they  know  to  be  defective. 
Badly  as  the  above  class  of  errors  work,  they  are,  on  the  whole, 
rather  less  serious  than  errors  in  rejecting.  A  single  act  of  injustice 
to  an  importer  does  more  to  discredit  the  law,  to  excite  opposition 
to  its  administration  and  to  alienate  sympathy,  than  can  be  overcome 
by  a  long  course  of  exact  dealing,  or  by  many  acts  of  special 
consideration. 
It,  therefore,  goes  without  saying  that  officials  who  are  wide 
awake  to  these  two  contingencies  will  be  scrupulously  careful  to 
avoid  errors  in  either  direction,  and  will,  when  in  doubt,  incline 
toward  favoring  the  importer.  In  such  cases,  it  is  customary  to 
"  release  without  prejudice,"  by  which  is  meant  that  that  particular 
lot  is  passed,  but  that  no  precedent  regarding  articles  of  that  char- 
acter is  to  be  regarded  as  being  thereby  established,  it  being  held 
that  in  future  better  information  may  lead  to  reversal  of  action. 
This  important  fact  regarding  the  attitude  of  our  officials  is  not 
appreciated  as  it  should  be  by  our  importers.  There  is  too  great  a 
readiness  among  them  to  assume  that  the  authorities  are  wrong 
when  there  are  the  best  of  reasons  why  they  should  have  investigated 
thoroughly  before  taking  action.  The  really  surprising  fact  is  that 
the  importer  frequently  protests  with  great  positiveness  when,  as 
subsequent  events  prove,  he  did  not  examine  his  own  importation 
to  ascertain  its  character.  Numerous  instances  of  this  kind  have 
occurred  during  the  past  year. 
A  prominent  importer  appeared  before  the  Drug  Section  of  the 
New  York  Board  of  Trade  with  the  open  charge  that  we  had 
rejected  his  cut  dandelion  root  "  just  because  it  had  a  little  dust 
upon  it " ;  but  the  inspectors  had  found  that  it  yielded  more  than 
48  per  cent,  of  ash,  about  ten  times  the  proper  amount,  and  they 
