A FREE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5504, 16 November 1878, Page 3

A FREE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

We make the following extract from an address delivered at the opening of the Section of Public Medicine by Dr. Arlidge, the President, at the late meeting of the British Medical Association at Bath, on the subject of " Occupations in their Relation to Health and Life " : :

" The cultivators of the soil—the agricultural laboiers— quoad their calling—are happily exempted from specific morbid influences. The oldest occupation of man is withal the most healthy. The farm-servant is a worker in the open air, and follows the natural order of day and night in apportioning his period of work and rest. If his abode be healthy and in a healthy locality, the conditions of his labor are calculated to promote Health and physical energy. If his fare be poor, he has compensation in the life-sustaining power of open-air work, aud in digestive powers capable of utilising all he eats. From indiscreet exposure to weather he will sutler, liko the rest of mankind, with inflammatory and other diseases arising from cold and wet, though not in the *ame high proportion. Probably he is a more frequent victim than others to crippling rheumatism as age advances. " What is wanting with our agricultural laborers a 3 a body, is the intelligent recognition of tho importance of well-ventilated and clean homes : of tho necessity for the removal of all effete matters ; or, to use the expressive and comprehensive word employed so cogently by Mr.-John Simon, of all "filth" from about their dwellings, and of the need of a good blood-and-bone-making diet, in place of the half starving diet of bread and butter and tea, which, unfortunately, has o'f recent times made its way among our laboriug classes of all sorts as the popular diet. It is not a question of mean 3 to obtain a better diet, for even in the case of agricultural laborers wages are double those earned by their forefathers, who found for themselves more nutritious food in the shape of meal, of oat-cake, of sweet milk or butter-milk, of bacon and bacon-broth, along with what their small gardens contributed. The explanation is to be sought elsewhere, aud is partly furnished, I believe, by the indolence of the wives in cooking, or learning to cook, who fiud it easier to replenish the teapot and cut bread and butter than to make porridge and oatcake, or to prepare broth ; and I am of opinion that the " free breakfast-table," the cheapening of tea and sugar, for which some years ainoe a cry was raised, and out of which much political capital was gathered, has been rather an evil than a good to the werking classes, and at the same time a cause of great loss to the revenue of the country, without gain to any, except it be importers and the intermediate agents of commerce."