Chapter 41

A few days later, at the Court of Requests in Westminster.

It was the opening day of the Select Committee for the Special Investigation into Food Hygiene and Adulteration.

Normally, that room would only echo with the sounds of a few members of Parliament and the scratching of a clerk’s quill, but today, every single seat in the public gallery was unusually packed with people.

They had come here for various reasons, but looking beneath the surface, it all boiled down to one thing.

The aristocrats had come to witness the end of the shameless merchants who had poisoned their teacoms, while the commoners gathered to find out what kind of changes this tumult would bring to their tables—or if it would bring any change at all.

“Witness, state your name and occupation.”

When the Conservative MP sitting in the chairman’s seat asked in a solemn voice, James Madison, sitting in the witness stand, trembled.

Yet people failed to recognize that he was Madison, given his rumpled clothes, unkempt beard, and deep shadows under his eyes.

Several days in the holding cell had completely altered the appearance of the Madison people once remembered.

“J-James Madison. I run a milk wholesale business.”

“Do you admit to the charges of watering down your milk and even mixing in calf brains to sell it?”

At those words, the courtroom rippled with a stir.

Noblewomen in the gallery covered their mouths with fans, wearing expressions of disgust, but Madison merely wore a tearful look, as if he still believed he was the victim.

“Honorable members, please listen to me. I didn’t want to do that from the beginning either.”

“No excuses needed! Give us your reason for selling poisons!”

“Poison? That is preposterous!”

Madison’s voice rose.

“Think about it. There are no pastures to raise cattle in the city of London. Dairy cows are away out in country farms like Essex or Surrey.”

He raised a hand, gesturing as if pointing somewhere beyond London.

“Do you know how many days it takes for milk milked from there to reach the London slums? Hauling along on a bumpy carriage takes a full two to three days.”

With that, Madison waved his hand.

“In the summer, it spoils in half a day and becomes sour, reeking garbage. Who would buy and eat that if we just sold it? If I threw it all away, I would go bankrupt!”

At those words, a few people nodded.

It was common knowledge that raw milk could not survive three days at room temperature.

“So you mixed in preservatives?”

There was no sense of guilt on Madison’s face.

To him, boric acid was not a poison, but salvation—an alchemical elixir that revived rotting milk and a rope that pulled him from the abyss of bankruptcy.

Thus, he truly believed he was in the right.

“Yes! If you put a little boric acid in, the milk lasts a few days longer. The sour smell goes away too.”

Madison’s logic was seemingly airtight.

Preservatives to extend the expiration date, dilution to cut costs, and additives for marketability.

He protested that he had merely brought fresh milk to the market.

“Then why did you add water? And why did you mix in brain matter?”

“Because the math doesn’t work out unless you add water! And when you add water, the milk becomes diluted and takes on a bluish hue. Customers see that and refuse to buy it, calling it plain water milk.”

He struck his chest as if frustrated.

“I had no choice if I wanted to restore the white color and make it look thick. I had to mix in things like calf brains to match the consistency, or else how would it sell!”

Jeers erupted from various places in the courtroom. “Such a shameless bastard!”, “Sentence him to death!”. Angry voices rained down like stones upon Madison.

“Drag him out! Next witness!”

The person who next took the witness stand was Tomkins the baker, and the atmosphere he exuded was quite different from Madison’s. While misery and grievance lingered on Madison’s face, a venomous edge dwelled in Tomkins’ eyes. People who still had something left to lose trembled with fear, but those who had nothing left to lose grew hardened instead.

“Mr. Tomkins, do you admit to supplying bread lumped with alum to Her Sacred Majesty’s tea party?”

Tomkins surveyed the members of Parliament with hollow eyes.

His gaze lingered briefly on each and every face before moving on.

Like someone turning the pages of a book, he was reading the faces of the MPs.

And like someone who had finished reading the book, he let out a dry chuckle.

“Ha! I wonder if you bigwigs would even understand a word I say.”

“What did you say?”

“You MPs have probably never even stepped foot across a bakery threshold. You only eat bread bought by your servants.”

Tomkins gripped the railing of the witness stand tightly. From afar, it was visible that his knuckles on the wooden railing were turning white.

“Do you think I used alum from the very beginning? When I first opened my shop ten years ago, I did honest business, too.”

His voice began to tremble slightly.

“Flour, salt, and yeast. I baked it using strictly just those. But do you know what the result was?”

He swallowed a gulp laden with grievance.

“Bread made with nothing added is yellowish and coarse. It doesn’t rise, so it’s small and hard. Besides, since I only used good flour, the price had to be high. I sold that for ten pence.”

He paused to catch his breath, then pointed sideways.

“Yet the rival shop guy down the street put alum in his bread and mixed in potatoes. And lo and behold, the bread baked snow-white and swelled up like cotton candy. Yet the price was six pence.”

Bread of conscience and bread of falsehood were laid side by side.

“Which bakery do you suppose the customers went to?”

Tomkins asked toward the MPs.

No one answered.

An answer already existed within the silence, yet no one dared to speak it aloud.

“One hundred out of a hundred went to that shop over there!”

Tomkins’ voice grew louder, and the resentment contained within began to spill over.

“Poor laborers don’t know the first thing about the taste of bread. To them, only two things matter: Is it white? And is it cheap?”

“Why is that?”

“To laborers like us, the existence of white bread was an object of longing eaten only by aristocrats. We dream of that scene, spreading butter thick on dazzling white bread and eating it dipped in jam.”

Moisture welled up in Tomkins’ eyes.

These were not tears of repentance or remorse, but the tears shed when a person crushed by the weight of reality could no longer bear that weight alone.

The yellowish bread placed upon the tables of the poor was a reality that reminded them of their class with every single meal, while white bread was a fantasy that allowed them to forget that stigma, if only for a moment. Therefore, people sought fantasy instead of reality, and reality could not compete as a match for fantasy.

“So they didn’t have money, but they still wanted to feel good. Do you know what people said when they looked at the yellow whole-wheat bread I made?”

His voice cracked.

“They threw the bread right in my face, saying, ‘Are you selling this dog feed for money?!’ They poured abuse on me, asking why my bread was yellow while that other place’s bread was white even though they paid the exact same money!”

The courtroom went as quiet as if cold water had been dashed over it.

“In the end, I bought alum to survive. I mixed in bone dust.”

With that, Tomkins began to chuckle with a silly grin, wearing an expression as if he were going mad from happiness.

“And then the customers lined up. They gave thumbs up, saying Mr. Tomkins’ bread was the best.”

In a world where falsehood was welcomed and truth was driven out, Tomkins, who had decided to stand on the side of falsehood, finally smiled.

The smile that only a person who had conceded defeat in a long war against themselves could manage.

“Is this my fault? I merely sold what the customers wanted, matched to the price they could afford. The place next door gets filthy rich by cheating, so am I supposed to starve to death while keeping my conscience all by myself?”

And his final words echoed against the ceiling of the parliament building.

“No! It is a matter of survival!”

Tomkins’ desperate cry crashed against the ceiling arches and bounced back.
The echo reverberated once, twice, three times before fading away.

The MPs fell into a stunned silence.

Most of them belonged to the landowning class who possessed vast estates, having never experienced the competitive struggle for survival that walked daily on the knife-edge of the market.

Tomkins’s protest was like a language from another world to them; though composed of familiar words, their meanings were entirely alien.

At that moment, Robert Peel, who had been watching this whole spectacle, was gripping the railing.

He was gripping it so hard that he did not even notice his fingertips turning white.

White fingertips—the very same white as the color of the white bread Tomkins had spoken of.

…There isn’t a single word wrong.

Madison and Tomkins over there were villains.

Undeniably villains. Yet, at the same time, a single question blossomed within his consciousness.

What on earth made them into villains? Was it their nature, or the system this country has created?

Consumers wanted high quality at low prices, and suppliers reached out for deception to resolve that impossible contradiction.

And when that deception was uncovered, the consumers raged and the law punished the supplier, but the structure that spawned that contradiction never once stood on trial.

If we don’t cut this chain, punishing Tomkins and Madison will only bring forth a second and third Tomkins and Madison….

At that moment, an MP cautiously tossed out a question.

“Still… even so, could you not have sold honestly without adding alum, even if it meant reducing your profits?”

Tomkins let out a snort.

“Reduce profits? Honorable member, do you even know how much a sack of flour costs?”

“Well… something reasonable, I suppose.”

“Reasonable? Ha!”

Tomkins laughed. That laugh held resignation rather than contempt.

“What would lords who bake bread with flour from their own estates know about anything? Flour prices are at a king’s ransom right now! The profit left from selling a single loaf of bread is less than one farthing (1/4 penny). The flour itself is so damn expensive that unless you mix something in, you can’t make the bread price work to begin with!”

Tomkins struck his chest in grievance.

“If even the price of flour were cheap, I would have just used plain flour, too! That’s much more convenient! But how can I sell it cheap when the raw ingredients are expensive?”

Buckingham Palace, the office.

As soon as the results of the Select Committee were delivered, I slapped my knee.

The price of raw materials! Why didn’t I think of that?

Wasn’t the company I worked for in my past life the absolute top food company in the country?

Among them, my department had been the confectionery and bakery business division.

The cost of bread and sweets depended entirely on the prices of flour and sugar. In the 21st century, rising manufacturing costs would have been suppressed through import diversification, but there was no way such a thing existed in 19th-century Britain.

“Send someone to the Board of Trade immediately and bring me the grain price trends for the past five years along with the wholesale price list for flour in the city of London.”

If Tomkins’s desperate cry was the truth, this problem could not be resolved by the morality of the merchants. A structural rise in production costs. I had to find that structure.

A day later, led by Baroness Lehzen, Trade Minister Poulett Thomson appeared.

He was carrying a thick ledger in his hands, its leather cover stamped in gold with the title Comptroller of Corn Returns.

“Here it is, Your Majesty.”

I snatched the ledger as if grabbing it and flipped the pages.

Amidst the sea of fine-print numbers, I narrowed my eyes and searched for the flour entry.

“Let’s see… 1837… 1838… 1839….”

My fingers, tracing the numbers, came to a halt.

[London Corn Exchange, as of January 1839: 81 shillings 6 pence per quarter of flour.]

[A 60% surge compared to the same month of the previous year.]

“…What is this?”

I doubted my own eyes.

Eighty-one shillings and six pence? The normal price used to be in the 50-shilling range—it had jumped by nearly 60%?

“Why is it so expensive? Did a famine hit or something?”

As I muttered to myself, Minister Thomson looked at a loss for what to do.

“That is… the harvest in the autumn of 1838 failed completely, but fundamentally, it is due to import tariffs.”

“Import tariffs?”

“Yes, Your Majesty. High tariffs are levied on cheap wheat coming from the continent, preventing domestic wheat prices from falling.”

“High tariffs? What is the basis for levying them?”

“Yes, Your Majesty. It is based on the Corn Laws.”

With that, Minister Thomson slowly began to explain what the Corn Laws were.

He explained that after the Napoleonic wars ended, the landowning class, fearing that cheap continental grain flooding into Britain would cause the prices of grain grown on their own land to plummet, had created the law.

And the landowning class dominated Parliament, made laws through Parliament, and protected their own wallets through those laws.

Everything was legal. And amidst that legality, people were starving.

“Baroness Lehzen?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Bring me the full text of the Corn Laws.”

A moment later, Baroness Lehzen brought the full text of the Corn Laws and presented it to me.

[The Importation Act 1828]

[Tariff Schedule (Sliding Scale)]

For the purpose of protecting His Majesty’s subjects and encouraging agriculture, import tariffs on foreign grain shall be applied differentially as follows…

I paused briefly over the word protecting and continued reading.

1. When the domestic price of wheat is 73 shillings or higher, a tariff of 1 shilling is applied to imported wheat—virtually duty-free.
2. As the price of imported wheat falls, the tariff skyrockets, hitting a tariff bomb of over 25 shillings once it drops below 60 shillings.

I slowly chewed over what this meant.

If wheat prices tried to fall, tariffs soared to block imports, and if wheat prices were high, tariffs were lowered to allow imports, but since the price was already high, importing was pointless anyway.

Looking at the tariff table, wheat prices that had been 39 shillings in 1835 had soared to an average of 70 shillings and 8 pence now (in 1839).

Converted to the 21st century, it was roughly equivalent to 10 kilograms of rice that used to cost 40,000 won suddenly shooting well past 100,000 won.

This is insane….

If the price of rice hit 100,000 won and commoners were screaming that they were starving to death, common sense dictated importing cheap rice from abroad to stabilize prices. Yet this damned Corn Law was instead slapping an extra 10 shillings and 8 pence of tariff onto imported wheat.

No matter how dirt-cheaply foreign wheat was brought in, hammered by heavy tariffs, import merchants had no choice but to sell it expensively in line with Britain’s insane market price (70 shillings).

It was an act that completely blockaded the influx of cheap food, forcibly locking Britain’s bread price at 100,000 won, and functioned like an impregnable fortress protecting the landowners’ profits even as it starved commoners to death. That was the true purpose of this tariff schedule.

“Ha….”

A hollow laugh slipped out of my mouth. I tossed the ledger onto the desk with a thud.

Tomkins had been right.

Flour was expensive. Far too expensive.

Poor laborers found it difficult to buy a single normal loaf of bread even if they surrendered their entire day’s wages.

So merchants mixed in alum and bone dust to lower costs, and laborers had to gratefully eat that poisoned bread anyway.

To eat poison, or to starve.

That was the only choice given to the common folk of this era.

“In the end… the real culprit was elsewhere.”

I looked out the window.

In the distance, the spires of the Palace of Westminster were visible.

The MPs who had bellowed at Madison and Tomkins in the Select Committee, calling them shameless wretches.

Those aristocratic lords who feigned gentility and morality while condemning fake bread.

Turns out, weren’t they the very masterminds behind this disaster?

Blocking imports by law in order to sell the wheat grown on their own estates at high prices, causing flour prices to skyrocket so that bakers had to sell adulterated food, yet acting as if they themselves were the victims!

“Fascinating. Truly fascinating.”

Would this fight end simply by making a food safety law?

Unless the fundamental cause—namely, the price of food—was resolved, no matter how much the law cracked down, a second Madison and Tomkins would be endlessly born.

How is that any different from pulling up weeds while leaving the roots behind?

After staring for a long time at my reflection mirrored in the window, I walked over to the desk and picked up the quill.

To solve the adulteration problem, the first priority is not enacting a food hygiene law, but abolishing the Corn Laws that distort the price of wheat.

Ink began to bleed onto the paper from the tip of the quill.

Let’s see. Is it really just wheat? What about the sugar used to make candy? What about other raw materials?

Thoughts chased their tails. One problem solved had ten new ones lining up right behind it.

And then, I suddenly grew curious.

Do the British people know about this?