540 FLOWER, FRUIT, AND VEGETABLE MARKETS. 



greengrocer, whose stock is often yellow on his hands, but 

 go where numbers of competitors are placed side by side, 

 and where from the nature of the arrangement the majority 

 of vegetables exposed must be fresh. To secure them in 

 that state is our chief want. As regards the quality of 

 the products when delivered by the grower, there is rarely 

 anything to complain of, for the market gardener is usually 

 an excellent cultivator ; but the bruising and filth and delay 

 they encounter before reaching the customer in London 

 often render them barely edible, while the very poor, in 

 buying the cheapest, often get that which is less fitted for 

 human food than the garden refuse thrown to the pigs in 

 many country places. Everybody knows the utility and 

 even the necessity of abundance of fresh vegetables to 

 keep man in perfect health. I believe that the propor- 

 tion of vegetables eaten by the humbler classes of Paris 

 and London is as seven to one, while all the advantages of 

 as perfect freshness and wholesomeness as can be secured in 

 a great city are with the former. The arrangement of the 

 markets has much to do with this difference. 



Our people are great consumers of the universal Potato, 

 which suffers little from carriage or keeping ; but it is almost 

 impossible for them to use any other vegetable as a regular 

 article of food, while the French workmen have a daily 

 variety. There is no country in the world where vegetables 

 can be grown more abundantly and cheaply than in the 

 country round London, which can pour its produce into 

 the great centre in an hour or two by rail, and yet for the 

 want of a sufficiency of markets, space, and order, the public 

 is to a great extent deprived of a benefit second to none 

 other. As for our chief fruit and vegetable market, our 

 famous Covent Garden, it is a disgrace to civilization. So 

 long as the largest and richest city in the world depends 

 upon Covent Garden as at present arranged, for its fruits and 

 vegetables, so long must it find them very deficient. Why, 

 the want of room alone is sufficient to frequently make 

 important differences in the prices, not to speak of the 

 treatment the produce gets at all times, and especially in wet 

 weather, the piles of baskets that convey it to market being 



