The Supply of Milk to Labourers. 
113 
general consumption among labourers is supplied as a favour — 
•and it seems to me that wages might as well be raised as a 
favour — I am afraid that its use as an article of daily diet has 
become impracticable under existing circumstances. 
To sum up the conclusions formed on the evidence brought 
forward in these pages, the use of milk has been abandoned by 
labourers chiefly from the difiiculty of obtaining it, and partly 
owing to a fashion for the so-called substitutes, tea, coffee, and 
beer. Notwithstanding all the medical evidence bearing on the 
subject, and the popular as well as learned treatises on diet, 
■the care of health, and the rearing of families, fashions and cus- 
toms still prevail in direct opposition to common sense and the 
<loctors. What has happened in the class above them has hap- 
pened to farm-labourers — their new methods of dieting the young 
are inferior to the old ones. Owing to the difficulty of obtaining 
milk in towns, how many children, even among the middle class, 
have been improperly fed for the want of it ? It would be an error, 
therefore, to conclude, from a spirit of mere optimism, that the 
fact of milk having gone out of use in country districts shows that 
it must have been supplanted by other foods of equal or superior 
value. That cannot be the case, so far as the young are concerned, 
since milk is known to be the only perfect food for them. 
If milk were rendered available at a cheap rate, the experience 
of its value would overcome all existing prejudices, and bring 
it once more into general use. The remedy for the present 
scarcity lies in the multiplication of small dairies, and, as the 
particular remedy which I fully described in the article on 
" Cow-keeping by Farm Labourers " is only capable of limited 
application, such small dairies, as several of my correspondents 
have referred to, might be encouraged with great advantage. It 
has sometimes been asserted that such dairies would everywhere 
spring up, if their produce were in demand. This, however, 
hardly meets the existing difficulty, for unless proprietors are 
assured of the importance of the small dairies, the land will not 
be easily obtained. A man who might desire to invest his 
savings in the way suggested cannot do so unless the land and 
the buildings are forthcoming, and it is not every land-agent 
who would manage and collect the rents for numerous small 
tenants so willingly as Mr. Haste and some others may do. 
It folio ws that in many cases the small capitalist might offer 
good interest on the necessary outlay on buildings, and he Avould 
still be refused the small dairy farm which he desired. The 
immediate increase of the milk-supply, therefore, seems to me 
to depend, in great measure, on the co-operation of proprietors 
with small farmers, which will probably not be withheld when 
the importance of the subject is understood. 
VOI^. XVI. — S. S. I 
