Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/121

Rh temptation. His evil opportunities are too many for him. Nor is it of much use to preach to him from the door-steps concerning the wickedness of his ways; because he will ask you to read from the newspaper you have in your hand the last reports about the rings, frauds, corruptions, stealing and plunder on a grand scale, in high places, and on the part of representative men whom the people delight to honor. Peculation, misappropriation, overreaching, and sharp practice, he tells you, are the order of the day—the rule, the fashion, and that a man "might as well be out of the world as out of the fashion." He tells you that business rivalries are desperate, that men must live, and that the world must be taken as it is. The milkman is of opinion that, if the business standards of the community could be raised to a level with his own practice, a long stride would be taken toward the millennium. He refers you to a report to the Board of Health in this city, in which it is stated that chalk, flour, starch, emulsion of almonds, sugar, gum, dextrine, borax, turmeric, annotto, soda, and sheep's brains, have been used for doctoring milk; but that, in hundreds of examinations of milk furnished to the citizens of this metropolis, none of these ingredients have been detected. Water, to be sure, is alleged to have been used, but what is more wholesome? and what are the secluded spring and the ready pump for, if not to supply it? He reminds you that societies are organized all over the world to get people to drink more of it; that milk is mainly aqueous, to begin with; that there is no natural standard of the proportions of this constituent; that the business of dispensing it is a detestable drudgery; that the milkman must be astir and abroad while other people slumber; that he has to rout the lazy servant-girls with unearthly screeches, and then wait till they are pleased to make their appearance; that there is waste with every pint delivered; that bills are hard to collect; that though his conscience be as white as the contents of his can, yet is he ever charged with cheating; that his rascally competitor is underselling him and he perfectly understands the cause; and, finally, that the losses and drawbacks of business have to be covered in different ways, while, if a little innocuous water is added to the milk, nobody is worse for it, and nobody can find it out.

Now, it is useless to reason with the milkman, or to exhort him to raise his conduct to the standard of pure and absolute rectitude, for, even if he should repent, he would be pretty sure to backslide. Yet the case against him is not to be given up; where homilies fail, science comes to the rescue; and, if its indications are followed, the milkman and his customer may be brought into tolerably harmonious relations.

How far the craft have wandered away from the paths of rectitude in this region, and how their venial transgressions swell into an immense daily burden upon the community, are well illustrated by the following statement from Prof. Chandler's report to the Metropolitan Board of Health in 1870. He says:

Now, granting that there is a great deal of money spent in New York, in worse ways than in buying water at ten cents a quart retail, it is still desirable to introduce more equity into these lactic transactions. The milk-consumer is