Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/68

64 I do not believe that this legislation will lead to the end which some men fear. I believe that the ultimate effect will be to promote a better understanding among the railroads and the people. I believe that when it is made the railroads do the people justice, the people will feel less resentful toward the railroads; and we will deal with these questions with more of reason and less of passion. It will take the railroads out of politics and we will hear no more about railroad senators. I want to see every corporation driven out of politics.

In opposing the pure food bill the senator says:

Thus it is that bureau after bureau is built up and we vest them with such extraordinary power, until the American people will become a bureaucracy instead of a democracy—a government in which the bureaus and not the people rule.

If the federal government has the power to pass an act regulating the use of adulterated, misbranded and imitation foods, it ought to stop when it writes upon the statute books that it will be a crime to commit such a commodity for shipment between the States and the foreign nations, and leave it to the integrity and efficiency of its judicial officers to vindicate the authority of its law.

Why should not the senator's argument in favor of the rate commission also apply to the food commission? Why should not also the liquor corporation, the drug corporation and the packing corporation be 'driven out of politics'? Why should rate experts, with extraordinary powers, be trusted to make 'the railroads do the people justice,' and food experts, with no limitation upon the courts, be expected to build up a bureaucracy antagonistic to the people's interests?

But, aside from these questions and the 'efficiency and integrity' of the judicial officers, the district attorneys and federal judges can not enforce a pure food law without facts and these facts can only be secured through a 'bureau' or staff of trained chemists, working in well-equipped laboratories under methods of analysis which have been established beyond doubt to be correct. There may be some occasion to fear that errors will be made in securing this evidence. There is greater occasion to fear that the investigation will make public the deficiencies and adulterations which some interests know to exist in their misbranded products.

The pure food issue is not altogether an issue of 'fraud' and 'poison,' but it is more largely a question of scientific and business problems—problems attending the preservation, packing and distribution of what the people live on; problems which the colleges and universities have too long left out of their courses, and problems which the experiment stations and government departments have too long neglected to study in connection with the production of the fruits, grains and other products from which foods are made.