e
rich are spoiled, too, by habitual good eating, and detect adulteration
more easily with their sensitive palates. But the poor, the
working-people, to whom a couple of farthings are important, who must buy
many things with little money, who cannot afford to inquire too closely
into the quality of their purchases, and cannot do so in any case because
they have had no opportunity of cultivating their taste--to their share
fall all the adulterated, poisoned provisions. They must deal with the
small retailers, must buy perhaps on credit, and these small retail
dealers who cannot sell even the same quality of goods so cheaply as the
largest retailers, because of their small capital and the large
proportional expenses of their business, must knowingly or unknowingly
buy adulterated goods in order to sell at the lower prices required, and
to meet the competition of the others. Further, a large retail dealer
who has extensive capital invested in his business is ruined with his
ruined credit if detected in a fraudulent practice; but what harm does it
do a small grocer, who has customers in a single street only, if frauds
are proved against him? If no one trusts him in Ancoats, he moves to
Chorlton or Hulme, where no one knows him, and where he continues to
defraud as before; while legal penalties attach to very few adulterations
unless they involve revenue frauds. Not in the quality alone, but in the
quantity of his goods as well, is the English working-man defrauded. The
small dealers usually have false weights and measures, and an incredible
number of convictions for such offences may be read in the police
reports. How universal this form of fraud is in the manufacturing
districts, a couple of extracts from the _Manchester Guardian_ may serve
to show. They cover only a short period, and, even here, I have not all
the numbers at hand:

_Guardian_, June 16, 1844, Rochdale Sessions.--Four dealers fined five to
ten shillings for using light weights. Stockport Sessions.--Two dealers
fined one shilling, one of them having seven light weights and a false
scale, and both having been warned.

_Guardian_, June 19, Rochdale Sessions.--One dealer fined five, and two
farmers ten shillings.

_Guardian_, June 22, Manchester Justices of the Peace.--Nineteen dealers
fined two shillings and sixpence to two pounds.

_Guardian_, June 26, Ashton Sessions.--Fourteen dealers and farmers fined
two shillings and sixpence to one pound.