EXPENDITURE OF THE WORKING CLASSES. 533 



latest debt to foreign observers. It may be hoped that the British 

 Association, largely attended as it is by persons who would shrink from 

 more ambitious scientific labors, will furnish some workers ready to do 

 their country the very real service of recording such facts as they can 

 collect about the economic habits of our own people, and so helping us 

 to know ourselves. 



Consider, for a moment, the consumption of food. To the ordinary 

 English workman life would seem unendurable without white wheaten 

 bread. Other forms of bread he knows there are, but he has unrea- 

 soning prejudices against wholemeal bread — the food of workhouses 

 and prisons — and against rye bread or other kinds of bread, the food of 

 foreigners. But in many parts of Europe the working classes have no 

 bread. Cereals of some sort, prepared in some way, they of course 

 employ. Wheat, oats, rye, barley, maize, buckwheat, even chestnuts, 

 are used indifferently in different places, and rice and potatoes are 

 among the substitutes. What is the relative value of these as food- 

 stuffs, and what is the best mode of preparing them? The reasons 

 which induced men in the middle ages to consume the cereals of their 

 own neighborhood have been so much weakened by the cheapening 

 of transport and the international specialization of industries, that the 

 conservatism of food habits is brought into strong relief when we find 

 neighboring peoples abandoning, first in town and then in country, 

 marked distinctions of national costumes, but clinging everywhere to 

 national differences of food. We are perhaps on the eve of considerable 

 changes here. Two years ago an American economist told me in Boston 

 that fruit had been the great ally of the workmen in a recent severe 

 strike. There had been an exceptionally large crop of bananas, which 

 were sold at one cent apiece, and the strikers had sustained themselves 

 and their families almost entirely upon bananas at a trifling cost — very 

 greatly below their usual expense for food. Eeturning to London I 

 found bananas on sale in the streets for a halfpenny. No doubt they 

 were consumed here in addition to, and not in substitution for, ordinary 

 food; but they illustrate the fact that the foods of other latitudes are 

 no longer the sole luxury of the rich, but are brought within the reach 

 of all classes, and that our popular food habits need no longer be made 

 to conform to the narrow range of former days, but may be put upon 

 a wider rational basis. The vegetarians, largely dependent upon other 

 countries, have recognized this. The chemist and the physiologist 

 might give us great assistance in these matters. Most of the calcula- 

 tions which I have seen as to the constituents of foods, their heat-giving 

 and nutritive properties, appear to ignore the greater or less facility 

 with which the different foods are assimilated. It is surprising that 

 rice, in some respects the most economical of all grains, needing no 



