Deliveries must be made within a certain time after production or pasteurization, barns and milk stations are inspected, and altogether such safeguards are employed as to make the supply exceedingly safe and reliable.
City Delivery.—In villages and small cities the milk supply is still to a large extent in the hands of farmers who come to town early in the morning peddling their milk, often at considerable waste of time for horse and man. Or a number of peddlers go over the same route so that it takes a dozen wagons to cover a town where three or four could do it.
As long as there was no efficient regulation as to price and quality such waste was perhaps unavoidable, as competition on the part of the producers and distributors was the only means of protection for the consumers. But lately state and municipal control is being exercised to such an extent as to largely eliminate the danger of poor milk and exorbitant prices. Further development of organized delivery systems so much to be desired for sanitary as well as for economical reasons, may be looked for as soon as normal conditions return after the close of the war. The delivery of milk is one of the things that in the interest of public health must be under the strictest official control, and co-operation between farmers and consumers is the logical system for elimination of unnecessary expenses of distribution and for prompt and satisfactory service. Their interests are or should be identical and both classes are hurt by inefficient and wasteful delivery.
In the large cities there has grown up an industry which largely monopolizes the milk supply and which until lately was powerful enough to dictate prices and
