be fried in little squares, with greens and
potatoes, making a savoury mess, and leaving
dripping in the pan; because, unlike butchers'
meat, it can be stored in the house; and in some
degree also, because it is sold by the grocer who
gives credit, while the butcher requires ready
money payment. Where there is not much meat
used in the cottage of the labourer, it is all
cooked for the Sunday dinner, usually the only
one at which the whole family is collected and
sits at rest together in unwonted ease. What
is left from the Sunday dinner is on the following
week-days the husband's, and whether he
take it with him bit by bit to his daily dinner in
the fields, or eat it at home, it is his, as a matter
of course, ungrudged. The household faith is
"that the husband wins the bread and must have
the best food." His physical well-being is the
prop of the house. If he have eaten up his
remainder of meat or bacon by the middle of the
week, and there be butter or cheese, he takes
that for his dinner at the close of the week, and
the wife and children at home are then reduced
to dry bread, which is converted into a hot meal
by the use of tea. When the dietary is poor,
and produces little animal heat, hot foods are as
valuable as they are comfortable. Dr. Smith
attaches little value to the small quantity of
inferior tea that gives its name to the warm
drink, and believes that the great charm of the
tea lies in its warmth, but the twelve pints of
skim milk that he wishes they would buy in
Devon with the same threepence they spend
upon an ounce of tea, can also be made boiling
hot; yet it is felt, and we do not doubt rightly,
that though it may contain more food it will not
give the same sort of cheerful refreshment that
even bad and weak tea gives to those who, knowing
little of better, are not offended by its flavour.

But often even in country places the labourer
cannot get as much rnilk as he wants. "In
many districts, and those perhaps where the
farms are largest, as in Wiltshire, the farmer
finds it a trouble to serve the skimmed milk to
the customers. The dairymaid is needed for
other work, and the mistress thinks it below her
position; and hence he gives it to his calves, pigs,
and hounds, and refuses it even to his labourers.
I found," says Dr. Smith, "families living in
the midst of plenty of this kind of food, who
would have willingly purchased it, but had not
been able to obtain it for two years, and where,
in consequence, the health of the children
suffered." One mother, living among Wiltshire
dairies, of which the farmers would not sell
milk, had brought up five children, and the
whole had not drunk one gallon of milk. Like
cases were met with in Somerset, Gloucester,
Lincolnshire, Suffolk, and other counties.
Buttermilk is almost wasted in England as a
very cheap nutritive and plentiful article of food,
and whey is almost invariably given to the pigs.

On the whole,it appears that the farm-labourer,
apart from his family, is adequately fed, long
lived, and little troubled with sickness. When
he takes his meals at the farm-house, his risk in
the way of diet is from over-feeding. He has
usually four meals a day, meat and bacon once,
twice, and even three times a day, milk twice a
day, puddings or pies three times a day in Devon,
and usually daily elsewhere; beer also or cider.
In Yorkshire he is found to get cheesecakes and
custards almost daily at breakfast and dinner, or
even to take an hour's nap after dinner. He
objects to mutton because it is fat, and throws
the fat under the table. When living at home,
the labourer who gets in some counties large
allowances of cider or weak beer, drinks it all,
the instances being exceedingly few in which
any is saved in his small wooden cask, and
carried home for the comfort of the wife and
children. In harvest-time, in the cider counties,
men not only drink their allowance of a gallon a
day, but, as there is then no limitation, are
found drinking daily two gallons and more.

In the principality, North Wales was found
to be more prosperous than South Wales, the
farm-labourers better paid, and better fed with
better kinds of food. In South Wales very
little meat of any sort is used, but health is
maintained on bread and milk and cheese. Dr.
Smith regrets that the use of tea and coffee is
spreading in the poor districts of North Wales,
for his carbon and nitrogen theory is not large
enough to comprehend a reason for their
popularity.

In Scotland, the shepherds increase considerably
their meat diet, by eating the lambs and
sheep which die of an acute disease called
braxy, and perhaps also of staggers, and some
other ailments less acute. The mutton is salted,
and becomes stored meat. The free use of milk
and oatmeal also gives an advantage to the
Scotch farm-labourer. In Ireland, Dr. Smith
rejoices in the abundance of meal, potato, and
milk. When potatoes are plentiful, and are,
with buttermilk, the sole food of the peasantry,
the daily allowance at a farm-house to each man
is ten pounds and a half of potatoes, and three
pints of milk; a day's food which includes no
less than ten pounds of fluid. One of the
labourer's families visited in Ireland was found
to be consuming four hundred and forty-one
pounds of potatoes weekly. Since the potato
famine, the use of this popular diet has been
restricted to a portion of the year, and the
instances have been few in which the labourer
has been able, as he used to do, to eat his pig.
The pig is now sold to pay rent, or buy clothes.
The average cost of a poor Irishman's food is
one and tenpence a week; of a poor Englishman's,
a shilling more; of a poor Scotchman,
yet another sixpence more than the Englishman's;
and of a poor Welshman, about twopence
more than that of the Scotchman; but the Irish,
says Dr. Smith, get the most, and the English
the least, nourishment; supposing the whole
question of nourishment to be, as he takes it, a
mere question of so many grains more or less of
nitrogen and carbon.

Our Chancellor of the Health Exchequer
takes for the next topic of his yearly Budget, a
particular disease of defective nourishment, the
sea scurvy in the mercantile marine, a result of