and children working during the fall picking this cotton, 30 cents a
day for the whole- family.

Now, you are having strikes all over the North by men who earn from
$2 to $5 a day. And yet here are a class of people who are striving to
live and support a family upon 30 cents a day for the whole family.
These are the people that 1 represent before you.

Last Christmas eve, a year ago, I received a telephone message from
my plantation manager. My plantations are near Hern. I live at
Dallas, 140 miles from there. I received a telephone message that the
town was full of my negroes, and that they wanted money to buy a
bottle of whisky. They did not have it. Now, these negroes had
worked faithfully. I had no complaint to make. In the winter storms
and in the heat of summer they had bent to the plow and the hoe, and
they had lived on cornbread and bacon and cheap molasses throughout
the year. They had made 985 bales of cotton, and yet they could not
buy a bottle of whisky to get drunk on at Christmas. Well, I tele-
phoned my manager to buy every one of them a bottle, on the ground

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OLEOMARGARINE. 693

that uoder the Constitution and laws of the United States and of the
States, a man had an inalienable right to get drunk on Christmas, and
I furnished it to them. [Laughter.]

Now, gentlemen, I feel that we of the South have been stepchildren
of this Government, For a hundred years we have been paying the
indirect import tax on almost all that we used for the benefit of the
factories North. We have been paying the fiddler for a hundred years,
and have never been allowed to dance in the set. But after a while we
discovered that there was money in cotton-seed oil, and all over the
South we built up cotton-oil factories. But as soon as we did, why,
here comes the dairy interest, the curled darlings of the nation, and
says, " You shall not produce a product that competes with ours." That
is the proposition. Why, do you know that we are paying taxes to-day
on olive oil from Italy, high taxes why? Because there are a few olive
orchards in California. We have more cotton interest in one county in
Texas than they have olive interest in the whole State of California.
See how anxious the Government is to protect every interest in the
Government until it comes to the poor devil of a cotton man.

Yes, sir; we began manufacturing cotton- seed oil. One of the
products of cotton seed oil is oleomargarine. Now they say, " Because,
forsooth, oleomargarine competes with our product, we, the Imperial
Cow- Milkers of the United States are to be protected by this Govern-
ment against the poor cotton farmer."

Well, if our own Government is going to kick us, that teaches all of
Europe to kick us. Any mother that kicks her own child licenses the
whole world to kick and cuff it. And they will quickly follow suit.
We are in competition over there with the olive interest, mainly of
Spain and France; and they will kick. We thought it horrible that
those Dutchmen over there objected to the importation of our meat
against them; yet they are foreigners to us.

Now, it is not the best butter makers that are in this fight against
oleomargarine at all. We do not compete with the Elgin people.
They do not complain of us. There are rich people all over this country
that are going to have butter, and pay for it; and we are not in coin-
petition with the class of butter they buy. But when you go down to
the low grades, then we are; and they are the people that are com-
plaining to-day. I heard Bob Ingersoll make a speech at Forest
Garden in 1896, in the political campaign. While I wanted to throw
a rock at him all the time he was talking, some things he said have
stuck to me. I remember a picture he drew of a horse race. He
said: "Here is a fine race horse, with flashing eye and nostrils dis-
tended, and sinews of steel, ready to outfly the wind." He said : "The
owner of that horse does not object if somebody wants to put a mule
in the race. But," he said, "every owner of a little scrub, who
doesn't believe he can beat a mule, and is contesting for second, third,
or fourth money in the race, objects to competition with a mule." And
to-day the best butter makers of this country, the clean butter makers,
are not in this fight against oleomargarine; but it is these men that
want to offend the nostrils and vitiate the taste and poison the stom-
achs of men with inferior butter that are clamoring here to Congress
to shut out a perfectly pure, clean product, with which they find they
can not compete. That is the situation.

What is oleomargarine, gentlemen ? Now, I am going to read two cer-
tificates from gentlemen right here in the city. One. is from Professor
Atwater. It is only a few lines: "Butterine" (which is oleomarga-



694 OLEOMARGARINE.

rine) "is perfectly wholesome." This is from Prof. W. O. Atwater,
Director of the United States Government Agricultural Experiment
Station, Washington, D. C.

Butterine is perfectly wholesome and healthy and has a high nutritive value.
The same entirely favorable opinion I find expressed by the most prominent Euro-
pean authorities, English, French, and German. It contains essentially the same
ingredients as natural butter from cow's milk. It is perfectly wholesome and
healthy, and has a high nutritive value.

The other is from Prof. Harvey W. Wiley, Chief Chemist of the
United States Department of Agriculture:

There can be no reasonable objection to the use of oleomargarine. It is clean,
wholesome, and digestible. When it is to be kept for a long time before use, as on
shipboard or in distant mining camps

and he might have said, in the Army

it is preferable to butter, because it has but little tendency to become rancid. For
similar reasons, there can be no possible objection to the use of cotton-seed oil as a
substitute for lard, or when mixed with lard.

Now, here are certificates from the greatest chemists in America and
Europe outside of the ones that I have read ; but I will not take up
your time with reading them.

Representative WILLIAMS. Just hand them, if you please, to the
stenographer, so that they maybe made a part of the record.

(The certificates above referred to by the witness are as follows:)

Prof. G. C. Caldwell, of Cornell University, says:

The process for making butterine, when properly conducted, is cleanly through-
out, free from animal tissue or other impurities, and consists of pure fat, made up
of the fats commonly known as alaine and margarine. It possesses no qualities
whatever that can make it in the least degree unwholesome.

Prof. Paul Schweitzer, Ph. D., LL. D., professor of chemistry, Mis-
souri State University, says :

As a result of my examination, made both with the microscope and the delicate
chemical tests applicable to such cases, I pronounce butterine to be wholly and
unequivocally free from any deleterious or in the least objectionable substances.
Carefully made physiological experiments reveal no difference whatever in the pala-
tability and digestibility between butteriue and butter.

Dr. Adolph Jolles, of Vienna, from address before section 7 of the
International Hygienic Congress at Budapest, says :

As regards nutritive value, pure butterine or oleomargarine is as digestible and
nutritious as pure butter.

Prof. George F. Barker, of the University of Pennsylvania:

Butterine is, in my opinion, quite as valuable as a nutritive agent as butter itself.
It is perfectly wholesome and is desirable as an article of food. I can see no reason
why butterine should not be an entirely satisfactory equivalent for ordinary butter,
whether considered from the physiological or commercial standpoint.

Prof. S. W. Johnson, director of the Connecticut Agricultural Experi-
ment Station, and professor of agricultural chemistry at Yale College,
New Haven, says:

It is a product that is entirely attractive and wholesome as food, and one that is
for all ordinary and culinary purposes the full equivalent of good butter made from
cream. 1 regard the manufacture of oleomargarine as a legitimate and beneficent
industry.

Dr. A. G. Stockwell, who needs no introduction, says in the Scien-
tific American :

In everyday life butter is very essential. Its free use by sufferers from wasting
diseases is to be encouraged to the utmost. Considering the foregoing, it seems



OLEOMARGARINE. 695

strange that oleomargarine has not been thought of as a palatable and suitable arti-
cle of diet for those suffering from wasting diseases.

It is free from all objections. As a matter of fact, it is a better and purer butter
than nine-tenths of. the dairy product that is marketed, and one that is far more
easily preserved. There are a large number who imagine oleomargarine is made
from any old scraps of grease regardless of age or cleanliness. The reverse is the
fact. Good oleo can only be had by employing the very best and freshest of fat.
This artificial butter is as purely wholesome (and perhaps even better as food) as the
best dairy or creamery product.

Jollies and Winkler, the official chemists of the Austrian Govern-
ment, after thorough investigation of butterine, reported:

The only germs found in "oleo" are those common to air and water. Although
carefully searched for, tubercular bacilli and other obnoxious bacilli were conspicu-
ous by their absence.

Mr. ALDREDGKE. Now, when these inferior butter makers strike the
chemist they always dodge. 1 have seen a mule that was beaten over
the head by a negro until every time a man raised his hand 50 yards
away from him he would commence to dodge him. And you can't get
one of them to talk about a chemist. Whenever he gets in the neigh-
borhood of a chemist he says, " Well, he don't know." Why, that is
what they are here for. The chemist is the highest product of science;
and he is here to tell us what is in every article about which we want
to ask him. And yet they say, ' He don't know." They dodge him
every time.

Now, gentlemen, I will elevate this butter crowd. I will agree that
their product is perfectly pure. That is agreeing to a great deal. I
was raised on a farm, and my business when I was a boy was to mind
the calf off and hold him off while the cow was being milked. It is done
in a little pen; and the cows drop a great deal of manure. That is all
ground up. You can not milk them in a big pen. That manure is all
ground up and in the air, and they are walking to and fro; and I can
show you certificates here from a dairyman in Iowa where he found that
very stuff in his milk, and complained about it. But we will grant that
they are making a pure product. Then what? Here is a contest
between two perfectly pure, wholesome articles of food. And one party
says, " Stop the manufacture of the other ! "

Now, why should the Government be called upon to interfere in such
a contest as that? Why should the Government be called upon to take
one man's business in its hand, and lift it up and put its hand upon the
other and sink it? Gentlemen, government among men never was
organized or contemplated for such a purpose as that never.

There is lodged in every man's breast an innate love of justice. You
can take the vilest criminal, and eliminate his self-interest, and it blazes
in his bosom. No man can eradicate the love of justice. Robert E.
Lee said: " The biggest word in the English language is duty." Well,
he was close to the mark, but there is one bigger word than that, and
that is justice and fair dealing among men.

Now, sir, if I were to see a dog fight out in the street, and if I were to
see one man go and take hold of the leg of one of those dogs and hold him
while the other one chewed him up, I would have a contempt for that
man as long as I lived. Suppose there was a boat race between Yale
and Harvard on the Hudson Kiver, and they had been practicing for
mouths. Suppose the river was lined with a vast multitude to see a
fair contest, and just before they started here would arrive a brass-
buttoned officer, sent by Congress to tie a log to Yale's boat. Every
man, woman, and child on the bank of that river would curse this

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696 OLEOMAEGARINE.

Government with curses loud and deep for such an act of infamy and
injustice.

Yet, gentlemen, that is precisely what you are asked to do by the
curled darlings of the dairy. They will admit to you, and they have
done it before your committee, that this product of ours is pure, it is
healthful, it is nutritious; and yet they say, "Because it competes with
us, kill it!"

Now, I know that there are a lot of Congressmen going to vote for
just such unjust and outrageous legislation as that. They have got to
do it. They live in a dairy district. They have got to put their con-
science deep down in the seat of their pants, and sit on it while they
vote, too. It is vote that way or lose their place. Well, maybe I
would do the same thing; I don't know. I hope to God I never will be
tempted that way.

Now, these dairymen are wealthy. They tell you how much they
control. They appropriated $14,000 lately for this campaign; and
every little dairyman that milks a cow in the United States has run
around and gotten all his neighbors to sign a petition; and yet, to day
there are not 20 per cent of them who can remember ever signing a
petition, or who know what was in it when they did sign it, and yet
they have flooded your committee with these petitions.

Now, gentlemen, is there any reason why this unjust legislation
should be accomplished? Why, butter is higher to-day than it ever
was. It is higher than it was forty, twenty, or ten years ago; and they
can not supply the demand. I see that New York is short of butter
all the time. They want a monopoly, so that they can put their prices
out of sight; and when they do, they want the people that are not able
to pay for it to be denied this wholesome article of food. These dairy-
men are already immunes from smallpox, and they ask of the Govern-
ment to give them immunity against competition. That is their posi-
tion. Now, who are on the other side? Why, the dairyman himself
is halfway on the other side, because the value of every bull calf born
on his farm is increased by the manufacture of oleomargarine. He
does not know it, but he is. In the first place, these cotton farmers
that I have been telling you about are on the other side. The oil mills,
the recent development all over the South, are on the other side. The
butterine makers are on the other side. The manufacturing establish-
ments all over the North, that make the machinery for the oil mills, are
on the other side. The mill in which I am interested bought its machin-
ery in Ohio, bought part of its apparatus in Chicago, bought another
part in Massachusetts, and bought something from almost every por-
tion of the North. Those people, those manufacturers, are on the other
side. The cattlemen are on the other side. I do not know about it
myself, as 1 am not a cattleman. But the southwest cattle convention
that met at Fort Worth declared that the manufacture of oleomar-
garine added about $3 to the value of every beef steer raised, and
they protested, in the strongest terms, against this legislation. The
hog men are on the other side, because butterine or oleomargarine is
made from the very purest, best fat of the beef, the very purest, best
fat of the hog, cotton seed oil, cream and butter, churned together.
And the laboring men, all over this country, are on the other side.

Gentlemen, the first thing I did yesterday morning when I reached
Washington City was to go over to the market. I found two stalls
there, butterine stalls. There are quite a number of butter stalls, but
I found two butterine stalls. One of them had in great gilt letters
over if, "Only butterine sold here." The other had a great glass sign

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OLEOMARGARINE. 697

with "Butterine" on it that could be read almost a quarter of a mile
away. I interrogated the first man. I said, " How is your business'?' 7
He said, "It is good. I think I sell more than any of these butter
fellows." "Well," said I, "why do your people buy butterine instead
of butter?" Said he, "I will tell you. You see, this butterine is 15
cents a pound. They can't buy butter as good as this for less than 30
or 35 cents a pound." He said, "Poor people buy this; it suits their
taste, and it suits their pocketbook."

I went to the other stall and asked the dealer," How is your business ! "
"Good." Said I, "Who buys from you?" "Well," he said, "a great
many poor people; but," he said, "don't you think they are only poor
people." He said, "A great many people who are amply able to pay
for butter patronize me." "Well," said I, "why do they do that?"
"Well," he said, " our product is uniform the year round, and you can't
get that in butter. Our product is inspected by the Government, and
guaranteed as to its purity; and," he said, " a great many people who
want a good article, and a uniform article, all the year round, patron-
ize me."

Gentlemen, all the butter men in the United States can not answer
the arguments of those two men.

You cut off the butterine industry and what are a great many labor-
ing men who work for $1 and $1.50 a day and have a big family going
to do? It seems that generally the less able a man is to take care of
a family the more family surrounds him. Now, take a man with a big
family of children, where is he going to get money to pay 30 or 35 cents
a pound for butter? Yet these dairymen ask you absolutely to pro-
hibit it from his table.

Now, they come before you and they say that thirty-two States have
adopted this butterine law, and that it has not had any effect. They
can not stop it. Why is that? Can Congress do any more? Why is
it they can not stop it? I will tell you. The world has never yet
found anything that it wanted that it did not get in some way. No
man can throttle a world's wants. The world lias tried oleomargarine;
it has found out that it is nutritious; it is pure; it is just what they
want; and all the legislation on earth can not prevent their getting it.
You might as well stand on the seashore and bid the incoming waves
recede.

Why, a great many of the States and a great many cities have tried
prohibition, but the world likes red liquor, and the result is that prohi-
bition has been a failure everywhere it has been tried. Almost all the
States of this Union have legislated against the social evil, but the
social evil has its attractions, and they have never been able to eradi-
cate it. They have succeeded in scattering it, and that is precisely all
that can be done.

Eepresentative NEVILLE. Will you permit me a question right there?

Mr. ALDREDGE. Yes, sir.

representative NEVILLE. With reference to the social evil, they do
fix it so that a man who does not want it need not take it, do they not?

Mr. ALDREDGE. Yes, sir; I reckon they do. It is all Greek to me.
I don't know anything about it. I will get to that directly, though.

Now, as Mr. Oliver, representing the North Carolina and South Car-
olina oil mills said, we have taught the people how to make one of the
finest foods in the world, and if you cut it off in its legitimate tax-pay-
ing shape, why, every little farmer in the country will commence mak-
ing it. And, as he said, you will have oleomargarine moonshiners
galore. You won't have courts enough to try them; you haven't got



698 OLEOMARGARINE.

jails enough to hold them. It will be like the Quaker's prayer when
the stars fell. He had not been very devout, and he fell on his knees
and said: "O, Lord, this do be the judgment day, and Thou knowest
that hell won't hold half of us." That is the way it would be.
[Laughter.]

Now, they say that this butterine is a fraud. Gentlemen, I want to
draw a distinction between fraud and innocent deception. There can
be no fraud without injury. If a man comes to me and says, "Let me
have a $5 silver certificate," and instead of that I give him a $5 national-
bank note, I have deceived him, but I have not defrauded him. Then,
if butteriue is as pure as butter (and the fact is, it is much purer) and
a man's landlady fools him with it, all right; she has not hurt him. If
a man's wife fools him, all right; she has not hurt him. And she would
have to have as many lives as a cat in order to fool him in this innocent
way as many times as he fools her in one other way.

Now. who is making this cry of fraud? Who is making it? Why,
when I was a boy I heard something to the effect that a man living in
a glass house should not hurl brickbats. For eight months in the year
every butter factory in the United States puts this coloring matter in.
Many of them put it in the whole year round. You can't have yellow
butter unless you have rich, green grasses. I know about that; I have
churned it. That used to be my business, too, when I was a boy. I
have churned it, I expect, nearly a thousand times. You can't have
yellow butter unless you have rich grasses, clover and alfalfa for the
cow to run on. Why, there are hundreds of dairies whose cows are
right in the cities, and never see a blade of grass. Those men, where
they are making genuine butter, color it twelve months in the year.
And any farmer colors it all during the eight months when the grass is
not green.

Now, their proposition is, u Let us fool the people; let us fool them
for eight months in the year; but, for the Lord's sake, don't let these
other fellows fool them at all." That is the proposition. It is a pious
fraud, if a fraud at all, all around; nobody gets hurt.

Now, if the Government is going to stop deception, the Government
is going to have its hands full. In the first place, if there is any mem-
ber of Congress who dyes his whiskers or his hair, he is a fraud, and
ought to be taken out and clipped. [Laughter.] Every time one of
you gentlemen goes to a bar, they hand you out beautiful red whisky,
and every bit of it came from the still as white as water. Maybe
you don't know what I am talking about; but if you don't, you can
send out and have the information gathered for your benefit. Why,
we smoked Havana cigars here the whole time, for three years, while
the Cuban insurrection and war was going on. Why, there was not a
blade of tobacco raised over there, and yet it had no appreciable effect
upon the supply of Havana tobaccos and cigars in the United States.

Nearly all of us carry alligator grips. There they are; and if every
alligator that was ever killed was a mile wide, he couldn't furnish the
hide for those grips.

All of you wear kangaroo shoes. I have a pair at home myself; and
there are probably a dozen poor little kangaroos about as big as a fice
dog killed once a year, and yet they supply shoes for the whole world.

These are innocent deceptions. 1 want to show what the Govern-
ment will have on hand.

We all eat canned goods. Did you ever sit down at the table and
have the good lady at the head tell you " These are canned pears," or
"These are canned cherries"? Never once in the world. Why, if we



OLEOMAEGAEHSTE. 699

believe that the cherries come right off of the tree onto the table, they
taste better and they look better to us. We get our imagination mixed
in with it. That is all right; it is an innocent deception. They never
say anything about their coining out of a can; yet they are just about
as good as when fresh. 1 have eaten gallons of sorghum molasses, and
they never told me that that was not made from river cane.

We will have to regulate the ladies. Why, they use paint; they use
powder. One of them steps out of her home onto the street, or to her
parlor, and she has these yellow ribbons on. Tbat is the thing that
makes these dairy people so awful hot. And her shape is perfection.
Visions of "the Greek Slave," and all the lovely statuary, rise before
you as she ambles down the street. She is perfection. And yet they
are not all built that way. Some of tbem are fearfully and wonderfully
made. [Laughter.] Now, the Government ought to take a hand in
that, and stop that kind of deception which they practice on us men.

Why, sir, the very wearing of clothes is a deception, and disguises a
man's deformities. Congress must step in and make every fellow go
naked, and grow hair like a hog. That's the way to be natural.

Now, gentlemen, the fact is that if the Government is going to regu-
late all the domestic affairs, and poke its nose into butter and everything
else, then the Government has got to quit everything else. She gives
up the Philippines and the management of Cuba, and quits making
treaties with the powers, and stays at home and attends to the home