The Art of Poisoning

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 46, 16 November 1905, Page 1

The Art of Poisoning

The days of the professional poisoner are by no means dead. The methods only have changed. The ' exihr ' of ..La Spara is gone; old Dame Toffania's ' acquetta ' has had its day ; and the exploits of that shapely female demon, the Marquise de Brinvilliers, are known only to readers of history. Nowadays the professional poisoner is the big manufacturer of adulterated food-stufls, and the murderous caitiffs who ' plaster ' your wine, and give your spinach and French beans their ' taking ' green with a dose of sulphite of copper, and Keep your breakfast ham sweet with borax, and on Wednesday morning hand you Monday's milk kept ' fresh ' with formic aldehyde. The seventeenth century has been called by historians the golden age of the professional poisoner. But in England and on the Continent the secret murderers were hunted down and executed with deterrent barbarities that made their calling too perilous to last. Henry VIII. would serenely dock the head of one of his long procession of wives before breakfast of a morning. But he made husbandpoisoning high treason, and visited it with a penalty that well befitted his savage reign— boiling alive. Nowadays the adulterating poisoner goes almost scatheless. He walks abroad irreproachably upholstered, holds his head high among his fellows, secures knighthoods and peerages from time to time, regards his trade as highly ' respectable ' and ' proper,' and, although he probably slays a hundred where the seventeenth century ' practitioner ' slew one, he would take dire offence at being compared with such lewd criminals of the deadly cup as a Viscount Rochester, a Glaser, a La Spara, or a Lavoisin. In New Zealand the public have lately been promised further and more stringent legislative protection against the arts of the modern representatives of the tribe of Toff am a Victoria is also getting ready some hemp for the necks and pickling some rods for the backs of the fast-growing clan of the food-adulterator. The Victorian Pure Food Bill is, as might be expected, meeting with some factious opposition — presumably on the part of some who desire to see continued for their brief day, or till the crack o' doom, the enormous profits that aie made, at the sacrifice of countless human lives, by the fraudulent adulteiation of almost every article thai is destined for human food. 'In France and Germany,' says the Melbourne ' Advocate,' ' severe enactments have been passed with a view to restrain the murderous practices of food adulterators. Stift fines, together with imprisonment, are imposed as penalties in

tjhose countries, besides which the guilty parties are compelled to advertise for several weeks on a conspicuous part of their shops or business premises the judgment of the court, giving full details of Ihe offence, and the penalty inflicted. In addition, the delinquents arc obliged to pay for the insertion of several advertisements in the leading newspapeis of the district, setting forth the same particulars ' This is a just and salutary remedy, that we should like to see in stringent and beneficent action from North Cape to Stewart Island In the o'uf Catholic days in Germany, the guild laws against adulteration were of fierce and unbending severity. Bax, in his history of the German social life of the period, tells how 'in some towns the baker who misconducted himself in the matter of the composition of his bread was condemned to be shut up in a basket which was fixed at the end of a long pole, and let down so many times to the bottom ot a pool of dirty water. In the year IHtlfi,' he adds, ' two grocers, together with a female assistant, were burnt alive at Nurnberg for adulterating saffron and spices, and a similar instance happened at Augsburg in 1192' * The lire-penalty is still in full \igor in the greenwood courts of the Black Belt of the United States. It was the Draconian punishment once inflicted by a stern and rigorous age Avhich regarded adulteration as a crime against society and scamped work as an outrage upon both ait and justice It was an over-harsh but well-meant cffoi ( to stop the small beginnings of the wholesale fraud thai permeates so much of the commercial life of our day Were iood-adulteration a hanging matter in this year of grace 1905, the public executioner and his assistants would be doing a large and thriving business, and -big battalions of fat and sleek ' respectables ' would now be lying peaceably in quicklime, after having danced an unrehearsed hornpipe in the air.