Persistent efforts were made to obtain the liberation of the prisoner, and Lord Russell of Killowen, who had defended her at the trial, and whose belief in her innocence had never wavered, brought the matter under the notice of each succeeding Home Secretary, but always without avail. It was not until after the lapse of fifteen years that she was liberated at the ordinary termination of a sentence shortened by the good behaviour of the prisoner. The course followed by the Home Secretary (Matthews) and endorsed by his successors is impossible to defend from a logical point of view. If the prisoner was guilty of murder, there was no justification for yielding to the popular demand. If, on the other hand, there was "a reasonable doubt" as to whether the man died from the effects of arsenic, she ought to have been set at liberty. But to commute the sentence for the reason given was to convict the prisoner of attempted murder, a charge upon which she had never been tried, and for which, if found guilty, she would not have received penal servitude for life. At the present time a case of this kind would be brought before the Court of Criminal Appeal, and the prisoner would have the opportunity of having the alleged misdirections of the presiding judge investigated, and of putting forward additional evidence--advantages that were not available to the accused in this trial. CHAPTER XVI ADULTERATION OF FOOD National Loss from Adulteration--"Adulterated" Electricity--The Beer Conner--Conflict of Evidence--The Notice Dodge--Preservatives--Standards for Food--Court of Reference--Administration of the Law. To label the adulterator of food as a criminal would, in the majority of cases, be too harsh a sentence, but in the worst forms of adulteration--those in which food that is positively bad is made to appear good--he more than deserves the title. Although in the larger proportion of instances the actual pecuniary loss inflicted upon the consumer by the sale of adulterated food may be but trifling, the loss suffered by the community collectively through various forms of petty frauds of this nature reaches an enormous total in a year. Some idea of the extent to which the public is thus defrauded may be gathered from the instructive figures published some years ago by Professor Long in the _Nineteenth Century_. In his article it was estimated that 1,400,000,000 gallons of milk were produced annually in the United Kingdom, of which over a third was sold in the form of milk, the remainder being converted into butter and cheese. Assuming that a tenth part of the milk were adulterated by the middleman, the loss to the farmer would represent over £600,000 per annum. There is little doubt but that this calculation underestimates the amount of milk adulterated by the addition of water or by the separation of the cream.