820 REPoRT—1899, 
M. Urbain Guérin, atiother member of the Société d’Economie Sociale founded 
by Le Play to carry on his work, has recently added a study of a tanner’s 
family in Nottingham to Le Play’s gallery of portraits: and some of the young 
members of the Musée Social and the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques have 
come among us animated with the same scientific curiosity. A vivid (and, so far 
as Newcastle is concerned, a trustworthy) sketch by a German miner, ‘ How the 
English Workman lives,’ just translated into English, is our 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 labours, 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 unreasoning 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-stutfs, 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 neighbourhood have been so much weakened by the 
cheapening of transport and the international specialisation of industries, that the 
conservatism of food habits is brought into strong relief when we find neighbour- 
ing 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 agoan 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. Returning 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 
recognised this. The chemist and the physiologist might give us great assistance 
in these matters. Most of the calculations 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 milling, 
easily cooked and easily digested, is not more largely consumed by the poorer 
families in this country. 
The effect upon our food habits of the introduction of railways and the supply 
of comparatively cheap fuel to every household is almost incalculable. But for 
this the consumption of tea, perhaps even of potatoes where there is no peat, would 
be very small. ‘The preference of the French for liquid, and of the English for 
solid, food has been attributed to the greater relative facilities which the French 
once enjoyed for making a fire, though the persistence (if not the origin) of our 
popular habits in this respect probably lies rather in the fact that a Frenchwoman’s 
cookery makes greater demands upon her time and attention. One result of this 
preference is that the essential juices of meat preserved by the French in soups 
and ragouts are with us toa large extent absolutely wasted. Owners of small 
house properties complain that, however well trapped their sinks may be, the pipes 
are constantly choked, and that the mysterious mischief is almost invariably cured 
by liberal doses of boiling water which melt the solidified fats cast away ina state 
