228 MORE POT-POURRI 



even keep my own accounts ! But most certainly, if I 

 were to give a lecture, I should say to everyone, high 

 and low: 'Spend far less in food and drink.' To the 

 under -fed and poor : 'Live twice as well as you do, on 

 what you have, by spending judiciously.' To the farm- 

 ers : 'Grow more peas and beans for wholesome human 

 food.' And to the seedsman : 'Sell these food -pro- 

 ducing seeds much cheaper, and put the price on to 

 something else.' 



I have said nothing about the cheapness of the diet I 

 recommend, as it is not cheap if it does not make you 

 well. If it does, it is very satisfactory, I think, to spend 

 so very little on food ; and eating so much less at each 

 meal is so delightfully comfortable ! I could not have 

 believed some years ago that it was possible to keep in 

 excellent health on so little. 



In Dr. Haig's little book 'Diet and Food,' he holds 

 out a kind of millennium where cooks might cease to 

 exist, and he gives a table of food requiring scarcely 

 any cooking, and which yet contains what he considers 

 a sufficient amount of albumen. This might prove ex- 

 tremely useful under exceptional circumstances. 



A reform I should much like to see is that, when a 

 doctor leaves a house at the end of an illness, he himself 

 should burn his prescriptions ; and that it might be 

 made penal for chemists to make them up except by a 

 doctor's orders. Doctors frequently give strong remedies 

 in severe cases, but they themselves would be the first to 

 regret these remedies being taken again and again on 

 the smallest provocation by the patient. The insane 

 desire to kill pain and to gain relief by narcotics and 

 strength by tonics which pervades our modern society, 

 from the youngest to the oldest, is, in my opinion, very 

 likely to act more deleteriously on the constitution than 

 the excesses of past generations. People become aware 



