consumers of milk, and, unfortunately, from the very necessity of their purchases being small, say ¼d. worths, or ½d. worths, they buy from the worst vendors, and, without doubt, succeed in procuring the most heavily adulterated milk.
There are milkmen of various kinds in London, some of them of the highest integrity, from whom unquestionably pure milk can be procured at any time, and at a fair price; but it would be absurd to shut our eyes to the fact, that there are in London hundreds and even thousands of men, whose sole qualification for the trade consists in their ability to undersell their neighbours by watering their milk.
Milk consumers have, however, become so habituated to use the poor watered and skimmed milk which is supplied by these tradesmen, that the loss which they incur from day to day is not appreciated; and although their infants are deprived of the food which they require, the result shows rather an increase in the bills of mortality than an improvement in the character of the milk supply.
There is probably no more curious illustration in the whole of our English commerce of the way in which a trade may go on increasing with the increase of the population, or even at a greater rate than the increase, than the milk trade; and yet, despite of this increase, it bears a bad name, so much so, that the finger of scorn is pointed at it. From our earliest boyhood “ Simpson ” has been a common by-word, and comparatively few children of ten years old fail to understand what are commonly called the milkman’s tricks. And yet, though the chalk-and-water talk of some twenty-five years ago, and the sheep’s brains even longer since, are exploded fallacies, the bald fact remains, that milk is more adulterated than any other article that is sold in England; and the number of samples of adulterated milk, purchased by the inspectors under the Adulteration Act, are almost or quite as numerous as the adulterated samples of every other kind of food put together.
Of course milk has been a source of an immense number of cases of prosecution and litigation—persecution the milk
