Variations on Themes from Scripture. No. XXI. Subject: WICKED BALANCES. "Are there yet the treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked, and the scant measure that is abominable? Shall I count them pure with the wicked balances, and with the bag of deceitful weights?"-Micah vi. 10, 11. A S King Solomon in the sententious gravity of iterated proverbs, so Micah the Morasthite with the fervour of prophetic excitement, denounces the scant measure that is abominable; and rifles, as it were, the treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked; and echoes the Lord's voice crying unto the city, concerning such, "Shall I count them pure with the wicked balances, and with the bag of deceitful weights?" So too does Amos, who was among the herdmen of Tekoah, but also among the prophets, and who prophesied no smooth things against those who made the ephah small and the shekel great, and who falsified the balances by deceit, and manœuvred where and how to sell the refuse of the wheat. So again does Hosea, also a prophet-if a minor prophet, the first of the minor prophets who declared the Lord's controversy with Judah, and with Ephraim exultant in having become rich, and having found him out substance. And how? "He is a merchant; the balances of deceit are in his hand." There is a legal punishment for short weights. If a grocer sells a pound of coffee as coffee, and it is only half a-pound of coffee and the other half chicory, he is a transgressor of the law. But of the spirit, and even the letter, of the law, transgressors abound; always have abounded, and seemingly always will. At least a transatlantic moralist conceives that "when haberdashers choose the stand whose window hath the broadest light," and "When preachers tell us all they think, And party leaders all they mean,— it will be about time to "order your ascension robe," -a phrase in vogue with a sect not yet out of vogue, across the ocean, to say nothing of what flourishes on cisatlantic shores. That trade trickery has in no age, or perhaps country, lacked its representative men, a very slight survey of universal history would suffice to show. The records of the "Liber Albus," compiled carly in the fifteenth century, amply detail the then current misdoings of trade tricksters all and sundry. A modern assailant of the "vexatious" interference of the ruling powers with the free action of trade, in medieval London, admits the frauds in those days to have been unquestionably frequent, and that it was the object of the civic authorities that every trader should really sell what he professed to sell, and that the buyers should be protected against adulterations, defective measures, and short weights. The medieval millers, for example, are proved to have been great rogues in grain; while the bakers, again, had a trick of making their bread of a fine quality on the outside and coarse within. We hear, also, of their "making holes in their tables, called 'molding bordes,"" through which they were in the habit of stealing the dough of those who brought it to be baked. The fishmongers, too, seem to have had a trick called "colouring "—that is, of putting good fish on the top of their baskets, and inferior beneath. Plautus had long before had his fling at "Piscatores, qui præbent populo pisces fætidos." Then, again, the ale-wives of medieval London used to thicken the bottoms of their ale-measures with pitch; and in short it is in evidence that the tricks of mediæval trade generally, as far as comparative ignorance permitted, might vie with the adulterations of latter-day tricksters. "Food Dr. Wynter, in his article in the Quarterly Review on and its Adulterations," expresses himself glad to find, as regards bread, the great blood-producer, that many of the adulterations mentioned by our older writers have vanished with the advent of free trade, all such sophistications as plaster-of-Paris, bonedust, the meal of other cereal grains, white clay alum, sulphate of copper, &c., mentioned by Prince and Accum, having disappeared; although the bakers of bread marked under the market price are in the habit of using what they call "hards" and VOL. XXVII. D “stuff” (alum and salt) to bring up to the required colour and taste the bread they have made from inferior and damaged wheat. Doctor Smollett, a hundred years ago, was writing his own experience when assigning it to Matthew Bramble, who says: "The bread I eat in London is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone-ashes; insipid to the taste, and destructive to the constitution." The same caustic censor denounces London milk as the worst of its kind, worsened yet more by being thickened with the worst flour into a bad likeness of cream; "but the milk itself should not pass unanalysed; the produce of faded cabbage leaves and sour draff, lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings," &c. &c,, here left nondescript, though Dr. Smollett, to be sure, leaves them not undescribed. Nor in his catalogue of London dainties does he omit mention of the beer, guiltless of malt and hops, vapid, and nauseous;" or of the "tallowey, rancid mass called butter, manufactured with candle-grease and kitchen-stuff." It must be allowed that Tobias, M.D., sometimes revelled in the nasty, and was in his element in the coarse. As for our own day, the result of the Lancet commission went to prove that tea, snuff, and sugar confectionery are, or were, largely "qualified" with such alternatives as the three chromates of lead, carbonate of lead and of copper, chromates of potash, orpiment, Prussian blue, Antwerp blue, indigo, ultramarine, and the like; that sulphuric acid was a main constituent in vinegar and gin; that terra alba, or Cornish clay, went far towards the making of flour, starch, and cocoa; that acetate of lead was largely in request for wine, cider, and rum; that cocculus indicus was a frequent ingredient in beer, blue vitrol in preserves, Venitian red in sauces, and black lead in certain black teas. Now, a consumer entering a shop and asking for any article, is justly said to have a right to expect that he will be supplied with what he wants, and for which he pays: the words coffee, cocoa, mustard, convey distinct ideas, and any application of those terms to mixtures and compounds is obviously deceptive and fraudulent. "Adulteration not only lowers the money value of an article, but it lessens its dietetical qualities, and in many cases renders it positively unwholesome, as where injurious substances are introduced." For some years previous to the microscopic raid against its enormities, adulteration had become a complete science, and was practised with consummate art and skill; substances of less value being used, for the sake of their bulk and weight, as substitutes for dearer articles, under the name of which alone they were generally sold, while colouring matters were freely added, and pungent suggestives to rectify the flavour, and pigmentary poisons to please the eye. One medical authority affirmed the average breakfast-table to be built up of adulterations: "there's lime in the eggs (year-old eggs, pickled in lime-water), sand in the sugar, horse-blood in the coffee, and, perhaps, mahogany saw-dust." Of fifty samples of green tea analysed by Dr. Hassall, all were adulterated. Ground coffee had for its grounds roasted wheat, acorns, carrots, scorched beans, roasted parsnips, mangold-wurzel, lupin-seeds, dog's biscuits, burnt sugar, red earth, roasted horse-chestnuts, "and above and beyond all, baked horses' and bullocks' livers." The grossest fraud was, in fine, proved to reign throughout the British public commissariat. Sharp-pointed pens have done their best against what is truly styled a true social evil, while alleging the difficulty of saying fine things about False Weights and Measures; for how, it is asked, can you get moral or tale or impressiveness out of a coal-dealer or a butterman, whose weights are short and his measures false? and where is the man who can glow and swell and thrill a multitude with the iniquity of a ham and beef dealer, or a tripe-seller; by pointing to the weighted dish of a local greengrocer, or the short weights of the chandler? "The cheating petty trader of Lambeth and St. Pancras, of Finsbury and Deptford, is too mean to furnish the point of an epigram, or the climax of a thundering invective"-and so the poor folk in the New Cut, or up in Somers Town and Lisson Grove, it is found, would fain listen to denunciations of landlords and employers (in delivering which oratorial demagoguy can be sublime), rather than " quietly reckon up all that they are cheated out of by the pigmy swindlers who supply them with adulterated and inferior goods, and with unfair quantities even of these." It is not the rich only who have the will, and have found out a way, to grind the faces of the poor. A modern seer of "The Mystery of Evil" makes no oversight of adulterators and their ways: "Yet direr were a class of murderers sage Who dealt round poisons-not that they might speed But, in a small way, daily fortune breed: Mortals, or slake their thirst. Perhaps the knife Had more of mercy, in its ready deed Of blood, than this destruction without strife, Which charged with lingering death the pure well-heads of life." FRANCIS JACOX, B.A. IN Strange Psychological Facts. Subject: MEMORY. N memory we encounter the oftest-noted marvel of hidden thought. It is a power that belongs even more to the unconscious than to the conscious mind. How and where we hide our knowledge so that it seems dead and buried; and how in a moment we can bring it to life again, finding it in the dark where it lies unheeded amid our innumerable hoards, is a mystery over which every one capable of thinking has puzzled. The miracle here is most evident and most interesting when memory halts a little. Then we become aware that we are seeking for something which we know not; and there arises the strange contradiction of a faculty knowing what it searches for, and yet making the search because it does not know. Moreover, nothing is commoner than, when a man tries to recollect somewhat and fails, to hear him say, "Never mind, let us talk of something else, I shall remember it presently," and then in the midst of his foreign talk, he remembers. So that the condition of his remembrance depends on this odd contradiction that he shall not only forget what he wants, but even forget that he wanted to remember it. When Daniel surpassed all the magicians, the astrologers, and the soothsayers of Babylon, by discovering to Nebuchadnezzar the dream which he had forgotten, he did not |