FOOD AND FEEDING. 477 



But, besides the natural sweets, we have also taken to producing 

 artificial ones. Has any housewife ever realized the alarming condi- 

 tion of cookery in the benighted generations before the invention of 

 sugar ? It is really almost too appalling to think about. So many 

 things that we now look upon as all but necessaries — cakes, puddings, 

 made dishes, confectionery, preserves, sweet biscuits, jellies, cooked 

 fruits, tarts, and so forth — were then practically quite impossible. 

 Fancy attempting nowadays to live a single day without sugar ; no tea, 

 no coffee, no jam, no pudding, no cake, no sweets, no hot toddy before 

 one goes to bed ; the bare idea of it is too terrible ! And yet that was 

 really the abject condition of all the civilized world up to the middle of 

 the middle ages. Horace's punch was sugarless and lemonless ; the 

 gentle Virgil never tasted the congenial cup of afternoon tea ; and 

 Socrates went from his cradle to his grave without ever knowing the 

 flavor of peppermint bull's-eyes. How the children managed to spend 

 their Saturday as, or their weekly obolus, is a profound mystery. To 

 be sure, people had honey ; but honey is rare, dear, and scanty ; it can 

 never have filled one quarter the place that sugar fills in our modern 

 affections. Try for a moment to realize drinking honey with one's 

 M'hisky-and-water, or doing the year's preserving with a pot of best 

 Narbonne, and you get at once a common measure of the difference 

 between the two as practical sweeteners. Nowadays, we get sugar 

 from cane and beet-root in abundance, while sugar-maples and palm- 

 trees of various sorts afford a considerable supply to remoter countries. 

 But the childhood of the little Greeks and Romans must have been 

 absolutely unlighted by a single ray of joy from chocolate cream or 

 Everton taffy. 



The consequence of this excessive production of sweets in modern 

 times is, of course, that we have begun to distrust the indications af- 

 forded us by the sense of taste in this particular as to the wholesome- 

 ness of various objects. We can mix sugar with anything we like, 

 whether it had sugar in it to begin with or otherwise ; and by sweet- 

 ening and flavoring we can give a false palatableness to even the worst 

 and most indigestible rubbish, such as plaster-of-Paris, largely sold 

 under the name of sugared almonds to the ingenuous youth of two 

 hemispheres. But in untouched nature the test rarely or never fails. 

 As long as fruits are unripe and unfit for human food, they are green 

 and sour ; as soon as they ripen they become soft and sweet, and usu- 

 ally acquire some bright color as a sort of advertisement of their edi- 

 bility. In the main, bar the accidents of civilization, whatever is sweet 

 is good to eat — nay more, is meant to be eaten ; it is only our own 

 perverse folly that makes us sometimes think all nice things bad for 

 us, and all wholesome things nasty. In a state of nature, the exact 

 opposite is really the case. One may observe, too, that children, who 

 are literally young savages in more senses than one, stand nearer to 

 the primitive feeling in this respect than grown-up people. They 



