168 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



and consider as shortly as may be how some of the best, most useful, 

 and most beautiful may be cultivated, and, if possible, improved, in the 

 garden. But we must also try to improve our country peasantry as well 

 as the wild flowers. 



Some far-seeing statesmen think it would be well to get the peasantry 

 back to the land, but that is not easy after our national system of educa- 

 tion and training has fitted them for work only in the to^^'ns. But if we 

 make the country attractive to the children born there, and if we educate 

 them especially for intensive farming or gardening pursuits, and do our 

 best to show them the many and varied interests and advantages of a pure 

 and healthy country life, then, and then only, will they consent to remain 

 therein. I read of an instance of a lady,* a Mrs. Banger, of The Elms, 

 Southwick, near Brighton, making a year from a quarter acre of 



land and a little greenhouse, and that she is now spreading her wings 

 further afield, and building a new residence from the proceeds of her 

 industry. Now, if this be true, and in the main it must be so, this is an 

 object-lesson worth the attention of the Sussex County Council and all 

 who are interested in soil culture. We have free trade in evervthing 

 almost except in land, and our land laws and customs need revising quite 

 as much in England as in Ireland and elsewhere ; cheap and simple 

 means of purchase or security of tenure are especially essential. With 

 land in the hands of the people who ar? able to make the best of it, we 

 should have more good and pure food, and more healthy men and women 

 to the acre ; there might be less game, but Sir William Crookes's scarcity 

 of wheat alarm need not frighten us, nor threatened invasion. We must 

 educate the children who are born in and like the country to stay there, 

 and do our best to win back some at least of the habits of old English 

 thrift and housewifery. I am not sure that we shall breed sound and 

 healthy children on " S^viss milk," or on any other stuft' made in a 

 factory and sent out in bottles or jars. True, you can purchase jams and 

 jellies, pickles or preserves as cheap from the mere pecuniary pomt of 

 yievi- as you can make them after gro'snng your own produce, but you 

 never know what vou are eating. A doctor of medicine has been defined 

 as " a man who pours stuff out of bottles, of which he knows little, into 

 human test-tubes of Avhich he knows less." But we find that even the 

 proprietors of the said test-tubes are careless, and rarely use the ordinary 

 caution and intelligence of the forest monkeys as to what they are given 

 to devour as food. We have just heard much of glucose in beer, and you 

 can get lots of it also in cheap confectionery, sweets, and jam. A little 

 schoolboy when asked in an examination — What is glucose '? gave in the 

 reply, " Glucose is made of anything on earth, and is put mto everything 

 we eat."' 



What with " substitutes " and " preservatives " — salicylic acid, for 

 example — and " coloured " and flavoured " or " sterilised " things, the 

 wonder is that we do not suffer even more from stomach derangements 

 and ill-health than we do. 



In spite of improved education and County Councils, Food and Drug 

 Acts, and other machinery supposed to protect us from wrong or de- 

 ception, science is now employed by many manufacturers and advertisers 



* Home Chat, March 30. 1901. p. 101. 



