Chapter XL: Act 1806: , and the Admiralty Offences (Colonial) Act 1849 (3)

ADULTERATION (from Lat. adulterare, to defile or falsify), the act of debasing a commercial commodity with the object of passing it off as or under the name of a pure or genuine commodity for illegitimate profit, or the substitution of an inferior article for a superior one, to the detriment of the purchaser. Although the term is mainly used in connexion with the falsification of articles of food, drink or drugs, and is so dealt with in this article, the practice of adulteration extends to almost all manufactured products and even to unmanufactured natural substances, and (as was once suggested by (John Bright) is an almost inseparable --though none the less reprehensible---phase of keen trade competition. In its crudest forms as old as commerce itself, it has progressed with the growth of knowledge and of science, and is, in its most modern developments, almost a branch--and that not the least vigorous one---of applied science. From the mere concealment of a piece of metal or a stone in a loaf of bread or in a lump of butter, a bullet in a musk baa or in a piece of opium, it has developed into the use of aniline dyes, of antiseptic chemicals, of synthetic sweetening agents in foods, the manufacture of butter from cocoa-nuts, of lard from cotton-seed and of pepper from olive stones. Its growth and development has necessitated the employment of multitudes of scientific officers charged with its detection and the passing of numerous laws for its repression and punishment. While for all common forms of fraud the common law is in most cases considered strong enough, special laws against the adulteration of food have been found necessary in all civilized countries. A vigorous branch of chemical literature deals with it; there exist scientific societies specially devoted to its study; laboratories are maintained by governments with staffs of highly trained chemists for its detection; and yet it not only develops and flourishes, but becomes more general, if less virulent and dangerous to health. There are numerous references to adulteration in the classics. The detection of the base metal by Archimedes in Hiero's crown, by the light specific gravity of the latter, is a well-known instance. Vitruvius speaks of the adulteration of minium with lime, Dioscorides of that of opium with other plant juices and with gum, Pliny of that of flour with white clay. Both in Rome and in Athens wine was often adulterated with colours and flavouring agents, and inspectors were charged with looking after it. In England, so far hack as the reign of John (1203), a proclamation was made throughout the kingdom, enforcing the legal obligations of assize as regards bread; and in the following reign the statute (51 Hen. III. Stat. 6) entitled ``the pillory and tumbrel'' was framed for the express purpose of protecting the public from the dishonest dealings of bakers, vintners, brewers, butchers and others. This statute is the first in which the adulteration of human food is specially noticed and prohibited; it seems to have been enforced with more or less rigour until the time of Anne, when it was repealed (1709). According to the hiber Albus it was strictly observed in the days of Edward I., for it states that: ``If any default shall be found in the bread of a baker in the city, the first time, let him be drawn upon a hurdle from the Guildhall to his own house through the great street where there be most people assembled, and through the great streets which are most dirty, with the faulty loaf hanging from his neck; if a second time he shall be found committing the same offence, let him be drawn from the Guildhall through the great street of Cheepe in the manner aforesaid to the pillory, and let him be put upon the pillory, and remain there at least one hour in the day; and the third time that such default shall be found, he shall be drawn, and the oven shall be pulled down, and the baker made to foreswear the trade in the city for ever.'' The assize of 1634 provides that ``if there be any manner of person or persons, which shall by any false wayes or meanes, sell any meale under the kinge's subjects, either by mixing it deceitfully or sell any musty or corrupted meal, which may be to the hurte and infection of man's body, or use any false weight, or any deceitful wayes or meanes, and so deceive the subject, for the first offence he shall be grievously punished, the second he shall loose his meale, for the third offence he shall suffer the judgment of the pillory and the fourth time he shall foreswore the town wherein he dwelleth.'' Vintners, spicers, grocers, butchers, regrators and others were subject to the like punishment for dishonesty in their commercial dealings--it being thought that the pillory, by appealing to the sense of shame, was far more deterrent of such crimes than fine or imprisonment. In the reign of Edward the Confessor a knavish brewer of the city of Chester was taken round the town in the cart in which the refuse of the privies had been collected. Ale-tasters had to look after the ale and test it by spilling some on to a wooden seat, sitting on the wet place in their leathern breeches, the stickiness of the ``residue obtained by evaporation'' affording the evidence of purity or otherwise. If sugar had been added the taster adhered to the bench; pure malt beer was not considered to yield an adhesive extract. In 1553, the lord mayor of London ordered a jury of five or six vintners to rack and draw off the suspected wine of another vintner, and to ascertain what drugs or ingredients they found in the said wine or cask to sophisticate the same. At another time eight pipes of wine were ordered to be destroyed because, on racking off, bundles of weeds, pieces of sulphur match, and ``a kind of gravel mixture sticking to the casks'' had been found.

Similar records have come down from the continental European countries. In 1390 an Augsburg wine-seller was sentenced to be led out of the city with his hands bound and a rope round his neck; in 1400 two others were branded and otherwise severely punished; in 1435 ``were the taverner Christian Corper and his wife put in a cask in which he sold false wine, and then exposed in the pillory. The punishment was adjudged because they had roasted pears and put them into new sour wine, in order to sweeten the wine. Some pears were hung round their necks like unto a Paternoster.'' In Biebrich on the Rhine, in 1482, a wine-falsifier was condemned to drink six quarts of his own wine; from this he died. In Frankfurt, casks in which false wine had been found were placed with a red flag on the knacker's cart, ``the jailer marched before, the rabble after; and when they came to the river they broke the casks and tumbled the stuff into the stream.'' In France successive ordonnances from 1330 to 1672 forbade the mixing of two wines together under the penalty of a fine and the confiscation of the wine.

Modern British Legislation.--In modern times the English parliament has dealt frequently with the subject of food adulteration. In 1725 it was provided that ``no dealer in tea or manufacturer or dyer thereof, or pretending so to be, shall counterfeit or adulterate tea, or cause or procure the same to be counterfeited or adulterated, or shall alter, fabricate or manufacture tea with terra-japonica, or with any drug or drugs whatsoever; nor shall mix or cause or procure to be mixed with tea any leaves other than the leaves of tea or other ingredients whatsoever, on pain of forfeiting and losing the tea so counterfeited, adulterated, altered, fabricated, manufactured or mixed, and any other thing or things whatsoever added thereto, or mixed or used therewith, and also the sum of L. 100.'' Six years afterwards, in 1730-173i, a further act was passed prescribing a penalty for ``sophisticating'' tea; it recites that several iii-disposed persons do frequently dye, fabricate or manufacture very great quantities of sloe leaves, liquorice leaves, and the leaves of tea that have been before used, or the leaves of other trees, shrubs or plants in imitation of tea, and do likewise mix, colour, stain and dye such leaves and likewise tea with terra-japonica, sugar, molasses, clay, logwood, and with other ingredients, and do sell and vend the same as true and real tea, to the prejudice of the health of his majesty's subjects, the diminution of the revenue and to the ruin of the fair trader. This act provides that for every pound of adulterated tea found in possession of any person, a sum of L. 10 shall be forfeited. It was followed by one passed in 1768-1767, which increased the penalty to imprisonment for not less than six nor more than twelve months. As regards coffee, an act of 1718 recited that ``divers evil-disposed persons have at the time or soon after the roasting of coffee made use of water, grease, butter or such-like materials, whereby the same is rendered unwholesome and greatly increased in weight,'' and a penalty of L. 20 is enacted. In 1803 an act refers to the addition of burnt, scorched or roasted peas, beans or other grains or vegetable substances prepared in imitation of coffee or cocoa, to coffee or cocoa, and fixes the penalty for the offence at L. 100, but subsequently permission was given to coffee or cocoa dealers also to deal in scorched or roasted corn, peas, beans or parsnips whole and not ground, crushed or powdered, under certain excise restrictions. An act passed in 1816 relating to beer and porter provides that no brewer of or dealer in or retailer of beer ``shall receive or have in his possession, or make or mix with any worts or beer, any liquor, extract or other preparation for the purpose of darkening the colour of worts or beer, other than brown malt, ground or unground, or shall have in his possession or use, or mix with any worts or beer any molasses, honey, liquorice, vitriol, quassia, coculus-indiae, grains of paradise, guinea-pepper or opium, or any extracts of these, or any articles or preparation whatsoever for or as a substitute for malt or hops.'' Any person contravening was liable to a penalty of L. 200, and any druggist selling to any brewer or retail dealer any colouring or malt substitute was to be fined L. 500. It was only in 1847 that brewers were allowed to make for their own use, from sugar, a liquor for darkening the colour of worts or beer and to use it in brewing.

All the laws hitherto referred to were mainly passed in the interest of the inland revenue, and their execution was left entirely in the hands of the revenue officers. It was but natural that they should look primarily after the dutiable articles and not after those that brought no revenue to the state. About the middle of the 19th century many articles, however, paid import duty; butter, for instance, paid 5s. per hundredweight; cheese from 1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d.; flour or meal of all kinds, 4 1/2d.; ginger, 10s.; isinglass, 5s.; and so on. Sensational and doubtless largely exaggerated statements were from time to time published concerning the food supply of the nation. F. C. Accum (1769-1838) by his Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons (1820), and particularly an anonymous writer of a book entitled Deadly Adulteration and Slow Poisoning unmasked, or Disease and Death in the Pot and the Bottle, in which the blood empoisoning and life-destroying adulterations of wines, spirits, beer, bread, flour, tea, sugar, spices, cheesemongery, pastry, confectionery, medicines, etc., etc., are laid open to the public (1830), roused the public attention. In 1850 a physician, Dr. Arthur H. Hassall, had the happy idea of looking at ground coffee through the microscope. Eminent chemists had previously found great difficulty in establishing any satisfactory chemical distinction between coffee, chicory and other adulterants of coffee; the microscope immediately showed the structural difference of the particles, however small. The results of Hassall's examinations were embodied in a paper which was read before the Botanical Society of London and was reported in The Times, 1850. A paper on the microscopic examination of sugar, showing the presence in that article of innumerable living mites, followed and attracted much attention. Hassall was in consequence commissioned by Thomas Wakley (1795--1862), the owner of the Lancet, to extend his examination to other articles of food, and for a period of nearly four years reports of the Lancet Analytical Sanitary Commission were regularly published, the names and addresses of hundreds of manufacturers and tradesmen selling adulterated articles being fearlessly given. The responsibility incurred was immense, but the assertions of the journal were so well founded upon fact that they were universally accepted as accurately representing the appalling state of the food supply. As instances may be cited, that of thirty-four samples of coffee only three were pure, chicory being present in thirty-one, roasted corn in twelve, beans and potato flour each in one; of thirty-four samples of chicory, fourteen were adulterated with corn, beans or acorns; of forty-nine samples of bread, every one contained alum; of fifty-six samples of cocoa, only eight were pure; of twenty-six milks, fourteen were adulterated; of twenty-eight cayenne peppers, only four were genuine, thirteen containing red-lead and one vermilion; of upwards of one hundred samples of coloured sugar-confectionery, fifty-nine contained chromate of lead, eleven gamboge, twelve red-lead, six vermilion, nine arsenite of copper and four white-lead.

Act of 1860.

In consequence of the Lancet's disclosures a parliamentary committee was appointed in 1855, the labours of which resulted in 1860 in the Adulteration of Food and Drink Act, the first act that dealt generally with the adulteration of food. The first section of this enacted ``that every person who shall sell any article of food or drink with which, to the knowledge of such person, any ingredient or material injurious to the health of persons eating or drinking such article has been mixed, and every person who shall sell as pure or unadulterated any article of food or drink which is adulterated and not pure, shall for every such offence, on summary conviction, pay a penalty not exceeding L. 5 with costs.'' In the case of a second offence the name, place of abode and offence might be published in the newspapers at the offender's expense.

1872.

As the act, however, left it optional to the district authorities to appoint analysts or not, and did not provide for the appointment of any officer upon whom should rest the duty of obtaining samples or of prosecuting offenders, it virtually remained a dead letter till 1872, when the Adulteration of Food and Drugs Act came into force, prescribing a penalty not exceeding L. 50 for the sale of injurious food and, for a second offence, imprisonment for six months with hard labour. Inspectors were empowered to make purchases of samples to be submitted for analysis, but appointment of analysts was still left optional. The definition of an adulterated article given in that act was essentially that still accepted at the present time, namely, ``any article of food or drink or any drug mixed with any other substances, with intent fraudulently to increase its weight or bulk, without declaration of such admixture to any purchaser thereof before delivering the same.'' The adoption of the act was sporadic, and, outside London and a few large towns, the number of proceedings against offenders remained exceedingly small. Nevertheless complaints soon arose that it inflicted considerable injury and imposed heavy and undeserved penalties upon some respectable tradesmen, mainly owing to the ``want of a clear understanding of what does and does not constitute adulteration,'' and in some cases to conflicting decisions and the inexperience of analysts.

Again a parliamentary committee was appointed which took a mass of evidence, the outcome of its inquiries being the Sale Of Food and Drugs Act 1875, which is in force at the present day, subject to amendments and additions made at later dates. This act avoided the term ``adulteration'' altogether and endeavoured to give a clearer description of punishable offences:--Section 6. ``No person shall sell to the purchaser any article of food or any drug which is not of the nature, substance and quality of the article demanded by the purchaser under a penalty not exceeding L. 20; provided that an offence shall not be deemed to be committed under this section in the following cases: (1) where any matter or ingredient not injurious to health has been added to the food or drug because the same is required for the production or preparation thereof as an article of commerce, in a state fit for carriage or consumption, and not fraudulently to increase the bulk, weight or measure of the food or drug, or conceal the inferior quality thereof; (2) where the food or drug is a proprietary medicine, or is the subject of a patent in force and is supplied in the state required by the specification of the patent; (3) where the food or drug is compounded as in the act mentioned; (4) where the food or drug is unavoidably mixed with some extraneous matter in the process of collection or preparation.''