AN UNFORTUNATE EXCHANGE

What has the Bureau of Chemistry given up? It has given up all it has acquired in its long and useful career. It has been denied a service to humanity which, if it had been rendered in the spirit of the law which it represented, would have proved the greatest blessing to the health and welfare of a nation. A service of this kind is one in which no person informed in regard to the matters could have raised the question of cui bono so vigorously advanced in the hearings before the appropriation committee on the present Agricultural bill. Finally it has given its life., We may ask: What would have happened in that Congress of 1906 if some one interested in adulterating foods had moved to abolish the Bureau of Chemistry? Outside of sympathizers with adulterators, it would not have received a single vote in either House or Senate. Those who engineered this legislation through Congress have thus accomplished the crime in which their predecessors of twenty-one years ago so signally failed. Tempora mutantur et nos cum illis mutamus. It was a poor trade. It will take the new organization many years to live down the bad reputation of one of its components. Let us hope that the influence of the new Bureau of Chemistry will cause a radical reform in its new spouse, which will make her unrecognizable in the near future. What kind of wife has it divorced in order to consummate this companionate marriage?

Let the old Persian poet and philosopher, Omar, speak:

"You know, my friends, with what.a brave Carouse

I made a Second Marriage in my house;

Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,

And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse."

On the other hand, the new Bureau of Chemistry has lost the opportunity of ever returning to the fundamental principles of the food law which have been so thoroughly turned aside. Thus it can never regain the public confidence and enthusiastic support which the late Bureau merited by its leading influence in securing the enactment of the Food and Drugs Law. The Bureau of Chemistry is dead. Those who lynched it should shudder when the people know all the facts of the murder. The plea of insanity will not avail.