104 
The Supply of Milk to Lahourers. 
observation, that milk is indispensable for the proper rearing 
of families ; and that the labouring classes, both in town and 
country, are liable to deterioration from the want of milk for 
their children. It would be easy to supply copious medical 
evidence to the same effect, but it would be out of place. 
In this short paper I propose to show, from a practical point 
of view, the value of milk as an article of diet, its scarcity, and 
the methods by which it might be rendered more abundant. 
Instead of collecting medical opinions I propose to quote Mr. 
Snowball, the Duke of Northumberland's Commissioner in the 
North. He says : — 
" I have always attributed the superiority of power and intellect in the 
Northumberland farm labourers to the food they receive in early life. Their 
parents had a cow, kept a certain quantity of wheat, barley, oats, and i)ease 
as part of their wages, with also about 1000 yards of potatoes planted, from 
which the most wholesome food was obtained for their sustenance, but after 
the tariff by which tea, coffee, sugar, &c., were reduced in price, a disposition 
grew against payment of wages in kind ; and the payment in corn and the 
keeping of a cow is the exception instead of the rule, which I much regret." 
Even in the North a change in the method of payments is 
leading, for the present at least, to the diminished use of milk. 
In the North, however, the milk question, as it affects farm 
labourers, is very much less urgent than in the south. The 
" family system " still prevails, and the young labourers, living 
in the farm-houses, get their basins of hot milk morning and 
night. Mr. Joseph Culshaw, Townley, Lancashire, informs me 
that the labourers in his neighbourhood do not keep cows, and 
the young men lodge in the farm-houses. 
Colonel Kingscote, the late President of the Society, resides 
in a locality incorrigibly arable, on the Cotswold hills, where 
the large farms of 500 or fiOO acres have hardly sufficient pasture 
for the maintenance of two or three cows on each farm, and 
where little milk is obtainable by either farmers or labourers. 
I venture to quote the following paragraph from a letter of 
Colonel Kingscote's, on the importance of the milk supply 
generally : — 
" I think every employer of farm-labour should sell milk to the labourer at 
as cheap a rate as he can, in proportion to the number of the family, as I do 
in my own case." 
Mr. John Treadwell, Upper Winchendon, has communicated 
the following information from the Vale of Aylesbury : — 
" In this district the practice is to give all the cattle- and stock-men and 
boys (whore a butter-dairy is kept) a good basin of hot milk for breakfast, 
and if there is any illness the larmers never refuse a can of milk. Irfince 
milk-selling has become more jircminent, I tliink that in many instances the 
stockmen get coffee or beer for breakfast instead of milk." 
