the labouring classes how to cook and make the
most of coarse and cheap food.

"Instructions were given for feeding a whole
family on vegetable soup, or a stew slightly
flavoured with the bones from the table of
Dives. At that time, and even later, we were
under the panic of over-population. There
were grave apprehensions that the whole
property of the kingdom would be eaten up by
poor-rates.

"These apprehensions are things of the past.
It is now universally admitted that we have
more reason to fear emigration than over-
population—an artificial rise of wages than a glut
of labour. Nothing is more certain than that
the labouring classes, who are the millions,
will now have meat more in quantity and better
in quality than what used once to satisfy
them."

Again, the cattle plague has made a frightful
blank. In March of this year the Privy
Council reported that in twenty months nearly
two hundred and fifty-four thousand cattle had
perished, and over fifty thousand healthy beasts
had been slain to arrest the spread of the plague.
Graziers became disinclined to meddle with a
description of stock so hazardous, and went
boldly into sheep-breeding. An eminent
Norfolk farmer—after travelling the length and
breadth of England early in this year on an
agricultural inquiry —declared that in all the
counties he visited "he did not see so many
fat bullocks as he had left in West Norfolk,
while the country positively stunk of
sheep."

There is another cause for the steady dearness
of beef that has not, we believe, been ever
mentioned in print. Butchers buy live beef
by guess, relying for a considerable share of
their profits on the loose fat and hide. But
these are quite a lottery. The most experienced
butcher may be mistaken by many stones in
his estimate of a bullock's fat, for oxen have
deteriorated in weight as the breeds have
grown finer. The old-fashioned breeds—of
which you may hear venerable butchers talk
with rapture—fattened slowly in five or six
years, and contained treasures of loose fat,
with good thick hides, affording a large profit
to the man who bought four quarters and sold
up five.

The beasts of modern times, pushed to
maturity at under three years, "do not die"
nearly so well as their unimproved ancestors.

For these reasons, the days of cheap beef
are gone, and for ever. But, even with these
allowances, the retail prices at the West-end of
the town do not seem to fit fairly with the
wholesale returns. And yet in this steady
balance against the customer there is nothing
very extraordinary when it is examined.

The butcher is one of the few tradesmen
who, in the face of an apparently unlimited
competition (there are four thousand butchers
in London), fixes his own prices and settles his
own profits, as far as a very large class of his
customers is concerned. Our grandmothers
went to market, and knew the current price of
everything; they chaffered and bargained as
ladies of considerable fortune do still in the
provincial towns of France and Germany. Our
ladies of London cannot now go to market, and
those who have a personal interview with the
butcher are an exception. The rule is a red
book, in which the weights sent by the butcher
are accepted by the cook or housekeeper, or
by any other grander person who rules the
roast and boiled, the stewed and fried.

This book, very careful housewives— quite the
exception— inspect once a week; others, once a
month; many glance at it once a quarter, and a
great many once a year, when the totals only
are examined, grumbled at, and paid. The
greater the consumption, the less the attention
paid to details. Weights and prices are
left to cook or housekeeper, who in mild cases
expects a handsome Christmas-box from the
butcher, but in the majority of establishments
takes a regular "poundage." That is the term
familiar to the trade. The kitchen-maid also
expects something, and the butler, if he pays the
bills, a handsome consideration.

How few there are who dare change the
butcher, the poulterer, and the fishmonger,
without the permission of a favourite cook!

This system destroys the butcher's
conscience, if he had any to start with. We should
not trust cabmen to fix their own fares. We do
not hesitate to change our bootmaker, our
tailor, and our hosier, if we can afford to pay
their bills; but we leave the butcher to fix his
own prices, with the slight check of a servant,
whose perquisites are increased in proportion
to the gross amount of the bills.

You can tell if a boot or a coat fits you, you
can compare notes with your friends. But not
one in ten of the well-bred classes, male or
female, knows anything about the quality of beef
or mutton until it is cooked—not always then
—yet quality makes a difference of twopence
to threepence per pound. The whole system of
meat bought cheap, and sold dear, by the
butcher, rests on the ignorance of housewives,
the perquisites of cooks, and long unchecked
credit.

The value of cash to a butcher will be found
the moment you look into the cutting, or ready-
money trade, and notice the prices at which those
who know how to go to market lay in their
provisions for the week. You will find the cutting
butcher selling legs of mutton—perhaps not all
wether legs—at sevenpence-halfpenny, when to
his more genteel credit customers he is charging
ninepence and tenpence. At the same time, it
must be understood that, without trade
knowledge, it is quite impossible to form an idea of
what should be the fair price of the primest
pieces, judging from a quotation of the wholesale
prices. For instance, you pay a shilling a
pound for the best loin chops, and, hearing
that whole loins are sold in Newgate Market
at sevenpence-halfpenny a pound, it seems a
robbery; but buy a loin at that price, cut off
the tail, the flap, the two wing-chops, and trim