224 MORE POT-POURRT 



' 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 farmers : ' Grow more peas 

 and beans for wholesome human food.' And to the seeds- 

 man : ' Sell these food-producing 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 cook- 

 ing, and which yet contains what he considers a sufficient 

 amount of albumen. This might prove extremely use- 

 ful 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 dele- 

 teriously on the constitution than the excesses of past 

 generations. People become aware of the loss of health, 

 but the mysterious ways in which remedies may have 

 injured us are wrapped in as complete darkness as is the 

 origin of most of the diseases from which all classes suffer. 



