THOSE PARRITCH.

Franklin Times, Volume 9, Issue 697, 6 January 1922, Page 7

THOSE PARRITCH.

NO LOGGER SCOTLAND’S FOUND-

ATION.

USE SPREADING ELSEWHERE

An English contemporary comments :—•

Scotland, we are advised, stands not where she did. She has forsaken ‘■the discipline which made her great. She eats no more porridge. “Stocks of oatmeal/’ we are assured, “are accumulating in Scotland with extraordinary rapidity,” because the Caledonian artisan has forsaken the diet of his forefathers. The feebleness of our age is blamed. In the good old days when men began <their work at six o’clock they came home to a breakfast of porridge. Now that they do not reach their factories 'vtill 8 'they eat breakfast before they start out, and their hurried wives will not he at the pains to cook porridge so early. It is a deplorable chain of moral error. We can think of nothing so tragic since the history of the old w.oman whose pig wouldl not ge't over the stile. If only the men were not lying abed, their wives would not be slack and the porridge pot would.not stand cold, and Scotland would not be feeding itself inadequately on white bread and ltea|. We believe every word of it, for the report comes from Glasgow., Yet there lingers in the mine! a memory that somethingvery like it has been heard before. Surely far back in other years we have been told that the modern Scot, a degenerate fellow, had abjured the ancestral oatmeal. You will even find the accusation in Encyclopaedias. It is not for a Southron to pronounce upon its justice. But what he may with diffidence offer to the consideration of Scotsmen is that in this, as in so many other matters" they have shown the Englishman the way he should go. In the English middle-class household porridge is a pfetft of the regular order of breakfast. The last generation has been reared upon the porridge regime, and there is no sign of its waning popularity. We have travelled far since the classic jibe was made, “Oats, which are in England the food of

horses, are in Scotland the food of men.’’ It would be an odd piece of ithe irony of time if in the jest and its famous answer, “And where will you find such horses and such men ?” the national part's had to be exchanged. But we prefer to believe that Scotland is not yet in this evil case. There is nothing sacrosanct in national traditions of diet, and a chance is not necessarily for the worse. Every age' has to make its own adaptations to new conditions. But the old-fashioned folk in Scotland who hymn 'the virtues of porridge aart no doubt, like our young people who insist upon their matutinal oatmeal, entirely in the right. We decline altogether to believe that ilt is possible for the true Scot individually or collectively to be in the wrong.