TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 821 
of solution. The number of persons who died of starvation in the administrative 
county of London in 1898, or whose death was accelerated by privation, amounted 
to 48; and we shall be pretty safe in estimating the total number in the United 
Kingdom at something less than 500. The common and inevitable reflection is 
that they might have been easily relieved from the superfluities of the rich; but 
it is true also that their sufficient sustenance was destroyed many times over 
through the ignorance of the poor. It would be difficult to find an English 
cookery book which a workman’s wife would not reject as too fanciful and ambi- 
tious to be practical, A little French treatise, La parfaite Cuisiniére, ou Art 
d@utiliser ies Restes, strikes in its title at any rate the keynote of the popular 
domesiic economy of which we stand much in need in England. Housekeeping, 
even the humblest, is a skilled business. To know what to buy, how to use it, 
and how to utilise waste does not come by the light of nature. If more knowledge 
and more imagination were devoted to the teaching of cookery in our Board 
schools, the family meal might be made more varied, more appetising, more 
attractive, and more economical, leaving a larger margin for the comforts, 
culture, and recreations which help to develop the best social qualities. A 
happy family is a family of good citizens. It would be discourteous to another 
Section of this Association to quote without reserve the mot of Brillat-Savarin : 
‘He who discovers a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than he 
who discovers a new planet.’ We must stipulate that the new dish effects an im- 
provement in the economy of the working classes. 
Take, again, the consumption of coal. Mr. Sargant says: ‘It is impossible to 
say how much of the superiority of English health and longevity is owing to the 
use of open fireplaces; probably a considerable part is owing to it. We all know 
how close and stifling is the atmosphere of a room heated by a stove, and how 
much more difficult it is to keep a room perfectly ventilated in summer than it is 
in winter, when the fire is constantly changing the air. It may be true that three- 
fourths of the heat of our fireplaces passes up the chimney and is lost to us; but 
we gain far more advantage by the fresh air constantly introduced into the room.’ 
Now with improved grates and improved fireplaces we may retain all the 
advantages of the open fire without so great a waste either of the substance of the 
consumer or of the national stock of coal; and attention is already being devoted 
to this fact in middle-class households, but some time must yet elapse before the 
advantage is reaped by the working classes. At a former meeting of this Associa~ 
tion Mr. Edward Atkinson exhibited a portable oven or cooking-stove, which was 
a marvel of simplicity and economy. He has described it at length in his ‘ Science 
of Nutrition, 1892. He argues that the attempts to combine cooking with the 
warming of a room or house are absurdly wasteful; that almost the whole of the 
fuel used in cooking is wasted; and that nine-tenths of the time devoted to 
watching the process of cooking is wasted; and he estimates the waste of food 
from bad cooking in the United States at 1,000,000,000 dollars a year. I have 
not, however, heard of his oven being at all extensively used. 
Upon the thorny subject of dress it is perilous to venture; but it is impossible 
to be in the neighbourhood of a London park on a Sunday afternoon without 
feeling that the efforts of domestic servants to follow the rapidly changing vagaries 
of fashion are carried to a pernicious degree of waste. The blouse of the French 
workman and the bare head of the Parisian factory-girl or flower-girl are infinitely 
more pleasing than the soiled and frowsy woollens or the dowdy hats of their 
English fellows, nor does the difference of climate afford an adequate explanation 
of the difference of habit. We must perhaps admit a greater dislike in England 
to any external indication of a difference in wealth by a costume different in kind. 
M. Lavollée, after referring to the low price of the ready-made suits which the 
Knglish factories ‘ fling by the million on the markets of the world, including their 
own,’ adds: ‘This extraordinary cheapness is, however, not always without, 
inconvenience to the consumer. If the clothes he buys cost little, they are not 
lasting, and their renewal becomes in the long run very burdensome. This 
renewal is, too, the more frequent in that the wife of the English workman is in 
general far from skilful in sewing and mending, Whether she lacks inclination, 
