Joseph P. Bradley

“ It is argued that, although the Dutch standard of color is named in the statute, yet the intent of the law was to adopt it as a standard of quality; and if, in consequence of changes in the mode of manufacture, it ceases to be such, the reason of the law ought to prevail, and quality ought to be still the test. ”

“ Congress alone has the authority to levy duties. Its will alone is to be sought.
It appears very clear, from the evidence, that the Dutch standard is a color standard only. As applied to the sugars of the Island of Java, brought to the mother country, it was undoubtedly a very fair standard of the quality of sugar. The juice of the cane was reduced in open boilers, and the viscous or molasses matter was expelled by drainage, assisted by percolation of water from a covering of white clay, which improved the sugar both in quality and color. ”

“ In process of time new modes of manufacture were adopted: the vacuum-pan in place of the open boiler, for condensing the liquor; the centrifugal tube in place of the old inverted cone, or leech-tub, for expelling the molasses; and animal charcoal, instead of clayey infiltration, for refining and whitening the result. The perfection of the refining process as now practised renders color in raw sugars a matter of little consequence, provided they contain abundance of saccharine matter. The color standard has come to be a precarious one. ”

“ That for tariff purposes centrifugal sugars are required to have a color obtained by the process of manufacture, without the introduction of any foreign substance in the process of manufacture for the purpose only of obtaining a darker color than that which the sugars would have obtained in the natural process of manufacture. ”

“ And it is better to submit to a temporary inconvenience than to set the laws all afioat by laying down a canon of construction which leaves the plain words, and seeks to spell out, or guess at, the supposed intent of the legislature, contrary or supplementary to that which is clearly embodied in the words it has used. ”

“ The percolation of clay water through the mass was one of the means adopted. The sprinkling of refined syrups in the form of spray on the sugar in the centrifugals is another. If the manufacturer uses these bleaching processes in order to make his sugars more salable, why may he not omit to do so in order to render them less dutiable; nay, why may he not employ an extra quantity of molasses for that purpose? ”