For many years margarine was the object of unprincipled prejudice and obloquy. It struggled desperately for recognition. Inventive effort was expended freely to render the product more and more attractive in appearance and flavour, to attract all classes of the community. Indeed, ingenuity was carried to such lengths as to produce a substitute impossible of detection from the genuine article, except by the most searching analysis. But the rejected of 1871 has become the indispensable of 1919. The prevailing shortage of dairying products, confined not to one single country or even continent, but common to the whole world, has compelled the recognition of the virtues of margarine. The alternative is to go without, inasmuch as other edible fats, which might have taken the place of butter, have become unobtainable. But the British public, which fought the advance and claims of margarine for nearly half a century with a blind fury, and being forced to accept Hobson’s choice, has encountered a pleasant surprise. The criticized butter substitute is found to be not so bad as it has been painted. With improving acquaintance opinion has veered round and now admits, somewhat tardily perhaps, that what was once considered to be only the poor man’s butter is, in reality, an excellent foodstuff in itself, and preferable to many grades of the genuine article, some of which certainly are not above suspicion. To convey some idea of the enormous hold which this article of food has now secured upon the public it may be related that the turnover of one firm, specializing in the preparation of this product, aggregated no less than £22,000,000--$110,000,000--during the year 1918. The increasing popularity of margarine speedily exercised a pronounced reaction upon the soap-manufacturing industry. The fats which were being utilized for the production of detergents were now demanded for conversion into foodstuffs. Hitherto, the soap-boiler has been regarded as the very lowest depths to which fatty waste can possibly sink. Thereto gravitated all the flotsam and jetsam of greases arising from other industries and in every stage of decay. But it did not matter how rancid the substance might be by the time it reached the soap-manufacturer. Here a scarcely credible metamorphosis could be effected, the most repellent raw material being transformed into the most attractive and fragrant acquisition to the toilet. Little wonder therefore that fats condemned as unfit or considered superfluous, though perfectly sound, for other use by man or beast, found their way to this mill. The soap-maker could absorb it all. Thus, it will be seen, the soap trade is founded upon the commercial utilization of waste, and this raw material is drawn from the three kingdoms--animal, vegetable, and fish. As a matter of fact, the source of the fat is immaterial. It can be compelled to play its allotted part in the evolution of the cleansing agent.