PUNISHING PROFITEERS.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XLII, Issue 11449, 31 January 1918, Page 5

PUNISHING PROFITEERS.

BURNING BAD BEEF BENEATH BUTCHER’S NOSE!! The general idea that food control ard the fixing of the prices of the necessaries of life is a novel out-, come of the present war is an entirely erroneous one. As a matter! of fact, from very only times until about the end of the eighteenth century the prices of such everyday articles as bread and beer, iustead of being left to the b iker and brewer to fix, were regulated by means of a system known as the‘ - Assize'of Bread and Ale, the prices being varied from time to time according to the alterations in the price of wheat and barley. The fixing of prices in this way was entrusted to the Lord Mayor and Alderman in the City of London and to the ; magistrates in , other parts of the country.

War bread is also no innovation, for during the Napoleonic Wars an Act was passed prohibiting thefsale of fine wheaten bread and making the use of brown bread compulsory, while the 'recent Royal proclamation enjoining economy in the use of food is closely modelled on the similar proclamation issued by George HI. There is alao"nothing now in Lord Rhondda’s proposals to do away with the middleman as far as possible. In fact in medieval times persons who bought goods in any of the fairs or markets /were prohibited from reselling them in the same market at a higher price than they had given'for them. Such persons were known as Regraters or Engrossers, while those who attempted to buy up goods Which were on their way to market were known as Forestalled and were liable to severe penalties. The Food Controllers of those days had but little mercy either upon the profiteers or upon those who tried to cheat their customers by the use of false weights and measures, while the supply of inferior and adulterated goods was also severely dealt with.

Nowadays a stiff line is the severest punishment likely to overtake the baker whose loaves are short weight, but in the good old times of Edward I. we read of a dishonest baker being drawn through the streets of London on a hurdle and being forbidden thenceforth to exercise his trade at all. An even more ingenious method of ‘‘making the punishment fit the crime” consisted in making the offender stand in the pillory for a specified time with a lump of dough suspended round his neck, and it. is perhaps lucky for some of those bakers whose war-bread has recently come in for so much criticism that they did not live in the days of which Major Arthur Griffiths tells us in his ‘‘Chronicles of Newgate,” when t\vo London bakers were stood in the pillory for making bread “of false, putrid, and rotten materials, through which persons who bought such 'i bread were deceived and might"be killed.”