Bread and Tea
THIS is a record of the confused and backward social conditions which Scotland put up with as a junior partner in the triumphs of Victorian Britain. There is an enormous amount here, some of which will be of interest to the very persevering general reader; it is a valuable account of such remedies as were achieved but above all of what needed to be done. But there is also too much— it contains an unreadable lacing of statistics and not enough sustained reflection. Mr. Ferguson goes into matters like what people ate, what they lived in, the care of the sick, the young, the poor and the insane. We are faced with the rise of bread and tea, the decline of porridge and milk and th'e inextinguishable prevalence of whisky, with cholera, tuberculosis, bothies, model lodg- ing houses and emigration, and with smoke, over- crowding and the Scottish love of low rents, the last three having survived effectively enough into recent times. In 1866 there was an illegitimacy rate of 10 per cent. among children born alive and three-year-olds were working in the brick- fields. The business of social improvement seems to have been very much a matter of individual insight and initiative. Something is due, for example, to the medical officer who deplored the tendency 'to send prancing over the country in- telligent, zealous officials whose mission seems to be—to shut up everyone who is a different kind of fool to themselves,' and to the Sheriff Fraser who told a Select Committee who wished to put down illegitimacy by restricting the benefits of the Poor Law : 'No woman is got with child in the hope that the child will be supported by the Parochial Board. . . . I take it that illegitimate children are the product of opportunity and
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