Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/57

Rh from problems which the manufacturing interests are honestly endeavoring to overcome. As a further result of tins meeting, it was impressed upon all that food-control legislation should he correct labeling rather than prohibitive, except where substances are positively injurious to health.

The Saint Paul meeting was followed by a similar and larger meeting at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in the nature of an International Pure Food Congress, and an exhibit showing adulterated brands of foods. The Saint Louis meeting was the largest of its kind ever assembled, and was a week, day and evening, of frank, honest discussion among officials, scientists and representatives from the several manufacturing interests. The congress discussed antiseptics, artificial colors, fruit, vegetable, dairy and meat products, confectionery, baking powders, wines, beers, distilled liquors and drugs. Special committees reported resolutions on the various questions, and among the resolutions adopted was a unanimous endorsement of the Hepburn Pure Food Bill which had passed the United States House of Representatives the previous winter.

For more than twenty years the Bureau of Chemistry of the United States Department of Agriculture has thrown the weight of its influence to the investigation of food and drug adulteration and its effect upon health. This bureau has had the cooperation of the association of Official Agricultural Chemists in perfecting methods of food analyses and in collaborating on a set of food standards. It is the agricultural chemist who has detected and called the country's attention to the evils of food adulteration. Formerly laws regulating the sale of foods were left to the boards of health to be enforced, but it is only as the states have created divisions of chemistry in the Department of Health, or have turned the work over to their experiment stations, or have organized state food commissions and equipped them with laboratories, that results have been obtained under state laws.

Food and drug adulteration has grown up because interests have been permitted to violate certain principles of identification in the sale of their products. When purchasers know where a product was made, when it was made and who made it, and are informed of the true nature and substance of the article offered for consumption, it is almost impossible to impose upon the most ignorant and careless consumers. Trade-mark law requires correct labeling as to who made an article and establishes the principle that a man is not to sell his goods under the pretense that they are the goods of another man, nor can he use any means which will contribute to this end. This principle has been upheld in courts as not only necessary to secure to each man the fruits of his own toil, but also as a protection to the public against fraud. Only the one, however, whose trade-mark is infringed has a cause of action before the courts, and where there is a business