THE PHYSICAL DETERIORATION OF THE NATION.
[To TILE EDITOR OF TIIR ''SPECTAT0R21 SIR,—In the light of our present agricultural difficulties, I am by no means an impassioned advocate for Free-trade; but as one who knows by personal experience what the condition of the agricultural poor was between forty and fifty years ago, I wish to say a good word, in spite of the Rev. H. Rycroft (Spectator, October 11th), for its immense practical ameliora- tion. No doubt it is a pity that the good old brown home. baked loaf has given place to the pale and stodgy baker's bread, which always makes me think of Sammy who ate dough,—
" And if tho worst comes to the worst, To-morrow he will surely burst !"
and I wish we may see flocks of goats roaming our lanes as freely as Swiss mountains ; but I can remember the black Crimean winter, when whole families lived on "flour flack "- i.e., gruel made with flour instead of oatmeal—and did not taste tea, far less milk, for months together. I know of an old woman who lived before my date in Surrey who described to a friend of mine how in the bad times before the repeal of the Corn-laws she used to eat bread made with chopped straw to increase its bulk, and was regularly sent out at dinner-time when there were berries on the common to find her dinner in the hedges. What would she not have said to a good meal off tinned provisions, even from America ? The fact is that when we think of the poor a hundred years ago, we think of the sturdy, respectable type made known to us in the poetry and fiction of English literature—Simple Susan's father, Adam Bede, and the like—and forget that in them we see the aristocracy only of the working men of the day. They, no doubt, had a sufficiency of home-baked bread, bacon, and fresh milk ; but below them was a stratum of families who never had enough to eat, who had no firing except the sticks they gathered, like Goody Blake, and whose rags were frequently worn to the verge of indecency. It is hardly too much to say that this stratum of country poor does not now exist. Here and there persistent drinking and idleness on the part of the breadwinner may bring his family into a condition somewhat re- sembling it; but though most of the aristocracy of the poor have emigrated to the towns, and with them the brighter and more energetic of the lower stratum, it is as a rule only in large towns that we find the submerged tenth. Even when the day comes that our deserted farms blossom as the rose, and our village dwellings are roomy and comfortable as those in Germany, I feel sure that tinned provisions will still be the cottage housekeeper's best friend. It need not be from idle- ness that the mother of little ones in a solitary cottage does not care to lock up her children alone, or to lug them through rain or snow to fetch problematical milk from a distant farm. It may be because she has a higher standard of maternal care than her grandmother.—I am, Sir, 8/c., SEXAGENARIA. [We welcome our correspondent's most valuable testimony. But how is it possible that, remembering what she does, she can have doubts as to Free trade ?—En. Spectator.]
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