1 70 Cottage Gardens, live Stock of the Cottager, 



This, then, is the beverage which most assuredly ought to supplant the 

 pernicious and expensive use of tea. Beer is always ready ; it is whole- 

 some, it is hearty, and it is cheap ; it does not require the ceremony of boil- 

 ing the tea-kettle, nor the parading of teacups and saucers, twice or thrice 

 a day; it does not require the adjuncts of sugar and milk to make it palat- 

 able; it does not exhilarate to produce palsied debility, but, while it exhila- 

 rates, it nourishes and strengthens. It does not require more than a quarter 

 of a man's earnings to purchase it, as is the case with tea, whereby he is 

 deprived of some of the real necessaries of life ; but a tenth portion of his 

 earnings is sufficient to supply him luxuriously with this good and truly 

 English fare. Look at the comparative cost of tea and beer for one week. 

 No woman, if the money can be got by hook or crook, will use less than 

 3 oz. a week, at 5d. an ounce, equal to Is. 3d. ; 1 lb. of sugar *, at 8d. ; milk, 

 Id. ; amounting to 2s. 6d., without reckoning any thing for butter, fuel, loss 

 of time in boiling the kettle and in gossiping, or for breakage ; while, on 

 the other hand, a peck of malt and 2 oz. of hops cannot amount to more 

 than 2s. -j- This malt and hops will produce upwards of 5 gallons of 



* We have shown how the British cottager may grow his own sugar, or 

 substitute honey ; and what substitutes he may grow and use for tea and 

 coffee. In the milder parts of England, he may grow his own Chinese tea. 

 — Cond. 



■j- We warmly approve of every cottager brewing his own ale or beer ; 

 and would wish him to brew it good, and drink it twice every day ; but we 

 would not deprive his wife of a cup of tea, at all events, once a day, and 

 twice if she chose it, unless she preferred coifee in the morning. We object 

 to the principle of diminishing the articles which constitute the necessaries 

 of life for the labouring classes, by which we mean all those who have no 

 other capital than their hands or their heads ; because nothing can be more 

 certain than this, that the value of labour will always be estimated by what 

 constitutes the necessaries of life for the labourer. The price of labour 

 for the time is always regulated, to a certain extent, by the supply of 

 labourers ; but the fundamental principle upon which this price hinges, like 

 the fundamental principle of the price of any piece of goods, is the cost of 

 production. A mud cabin, a bundle of straw, and potatoes, are the raw 

 materials out of which is formed a country labourer in Ireland, and he is 

 paid with 5d. a day ; but, as we have lately seen, he will work for 3d., or even 

 \\d. In Scotland, the huts for labourers are of stone, often colder than 

 those m Ireland, and, as a shelter from the weather, nearly as wretched ; but 

 the inhabitant is a little more particular respecting his bedding and body- 

 clothing, and to potatoes he adds oatmeal. The cost of production being 

 thus greater, the wages vary from Is. to 3s. a day. Before a Scotch labourer 

 will work for Is. a day, he will emigrate; because he cannot live upon that 

 sum, and has not such a ready claim on his parish as the English labourer. 

 In England, no man will work for twice the regular wages of Ireland : he 

 will rather go on the parish, by which he is, in general, certain of better 

 food than is procured by the labourer in Scotland ; and, at least, of as good 

 bedding, and better lodging. If English labourers could be made to live 

 upon potatoes, and lodge in mud cottages which they could erect themselves, 

 the number of labourers would soon be as great, and the price of labour as 

 low, as in Ireland, bating the difference of the cost of raising potatoes in 

 the two countries. If, on the other hand, the labourers of Ireland could be 

 refined to such a degree as not to be able to exist without good bread, 

 butcher's meat, beer, and tea and sugar, the wages of labour, even when there 

 was a glut of labourers, would bear an approximation to what was equal to 

 the purchase of these articles. We are justified in saying this from what 

 takes place in England and Scotland, when labourers superabound : and 

 we are supported by all political economists when we say, add to the enjoy- 



