Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/66

62 dominant costs in production. The rectifier seeks to lessen these costs by expansion, or by the addition of artificial essences to neutral spirits to make a product which will taste and appear like genuine whiskey. Sometimes more or less genuine whiskey is mixed with this neutral spirit to help the flavor, and when such is the case, and when the flavors and other imitations added are harmless, the product has all the rights of the market provided it is labeled for what it is.

New genuine whiskey is often taken from bond before it is sufficiently aged and syrups are added to make it palatable. Green whiskey is unfit for consumption, and this practise should be prohibited. In one class of rectified whiskey the mixer not only seeks to avoid the cost of producing the natural flavor, but also to reduce the tax cost of the ethyl alcohol by incorporating some one of the non-taxed intoxicants, like wood alcohol. There are no statistics to show to just what extent this practise is carried on. It is such stuff as this which is sold in the 'dives' of cities and the 'blind tigers' of prohibition districts, and its crazing effect upon human beings is a matter of common knowledge.

The people who do not drink alcoholic beverages know little and care less about the composition and labeling of these products. "They are all bad because they contain ethyl alcohol, and there can be little difference between the adulterated and the pure." Some of the prohibitionists even fear that the investigation might help to 'legalize part of the traffic' But it would seem wiser to insist that the searchlight of chemistry and the law of the honest label shall be applied to all substances intended for human consumption, whether foods, drugs or liquors. And such a control for alcoholic beverages is the beginning of a far-reaching reform. Some things are worthy of the sentiment of state rights. The adulteration of alcoholic beverages is not one of them.

All agree on the general principles of pure food legislation, but a controversy arises when it is proposed to apply these principles to the sale of some special product. The name and describing terms given to or incorporated in the label of an article of food or drink have much to do with the price and supposed food value of the article so named or labeled. The imitation, where law does not prevent it, goes into the market under the name and trade terms of the product imitated, and is so mingled in the market with the general food that it is impossible for consumers to distinguish between the two.

It is the purpose of standards to determine and establish the normal constituents of each food substance and to so apply and restrict names and describing terms that consumers can at once identify the imitation from the genuine or the inferior from the superior. The interests