OCR Text |
Show FRAUDS IN AMERICAN COTTON. The report of the American Consul at Manchester that the charges of fraud in the packing of American cotton are true is frank and fair enough. Mr. Shaw has, in the figurative language of the far West, "acknowledged the corn." Lancashire has long complained that the weight of cotton is increased by putting sand and water into the bales. Hundreds of tons of sand are paid for at the price of cotton every year. No moderation appears to have been exercised in this species of fraud, for the sand seems to have been thrown in by shovelfuls. This is very dishonorable, and demands caution on the part of the buyer; but we may remind the spinners of Oldham? that it is one of the oldest and most vulgar kinds of fraud of which the commercial world is cognizant. To increase the weight of a valuable article by concealing within it some article of greater weight and less value is one of the most ancient kinds of fraudality? [fraudulence]. The "augmentation of mercury," as it was called, was a fertile fraud of the last century, and the pigmention [pigmentation] of silk by the addition of dye is so familiar in our own day as to have almost ceased to be a fraud at all. Everybody knows that a pound of silk can be dyed to any required weight, as a yard of cotton can be "finished" to any extent desired. It is also fairly well known that a reel of cotton "warranted" to contain so many yards does not always contain that measure. These instances resemble ??? "jewelers' gold," the proportions where if are said to be a golden guinea to a copper coal scuttle, and albeit discreditable are of the nature of the ??? tricks of the diplomatist who "lied always has deceived nobody." The "sanding" of cotton, like the ??? of sugar is of the earliest form of swindling, to be sought far down in the primary stratum of rascaldom?. The "noble savage is clever enough to introduce stones and other weighty substances into lumps of gotta percha? and indiarubber [India rubber]. But this prehistoric method of robbery is hardly worthy of a "smart" country, and might have been disbelieved had it not been for the inanly [inanely] and straightforward avowal of the American Consul at Machester. -- London News. |