The professor was sitting in the lobby of a hotel not distant from New York. The proprietor of the hotel called up a New York meat dealer on the long-distance ‘phone to complain that some bad beef had been sent to the hotel. He said he had never yet fed his patrons on rotten beef and he didn’t intend to begin. The beef must be taken away and the charge deducted from his bill. The man at the other end of the wire evidently offered no opposition, and the receiver was hung up. Soon the telephone rang again. New York was on the wire. The conversation was brief. All that Professor Fisher could hear was the hotel man’s single remark: “I’ll see what I can do and let you know.” The hotel man rang off and immediately called up a local restaurant. Then Professor Fisher heard this cheerful statement go over the wire: “I’ve got some beef here that ain’t just right, and the New York people who sent it to me wanted me to see if I couldn’t sell it for them up here ... Oh, it’ll hang together yet, but ’tain’t what I want for my people; you might use it, though ... I don’t know what the price will be. You’ll have to make your bargain with them, but it won’t be much.... All right, send over and get it.” And this—and a thousand times more than this—under the Pure Food Law! Such crimes could not occur if the government, when it tried to enact a decent law, had not been thrown flat on its back. The pity of it is that when big business and a government come into collision over public health matters, the government is usually thrown on its back. “I doubt,” said Dr. Hutchinson, “whether there is a local health officer at any post of entry in the United States who, if a case of plague, cholera or yellow fever should appear on a ship, would not think three or four times before he reported it. And if he did report it, as the law requires him to do, his act would cost him his position. Business interests would cause his removal.” This is not mere talk. Nor is it simply prophecy. It is history. So long as New Orleans was subject to periodical outbreaks of yellow fever, the health authorities were compelled not only to fight the disease, but to fight the business interests that denied its existence. Dr. Hutchinson says that business interests once caused the removal of the State health officer of Louisiana, merely because he insisted that yellow fever existed in the State—which it did. Dr. Hutchinson himself, as State health officer of Oregon, in 1905–6, had to fight big business to conserve public health. Big business whipped him. His experiences were not novel, but one of them will be related for the simple reason that it was not novel, and therefore shows the sort of opposition that health officers, all over the land, are compelled to encounter.