The vegetarians would do better did they exercise more of the grace of charity. In one of the numbers of _Social Notes_, Mr. Nunn, who is secretary of the “Food Reform Society,” is indignant at the bill of fare in the coffee public-houses. The food is “too stimulating, and not at all in accordance with dietetic principles.” They sell “the highly-seasoned, and drunkard’s thirst-creating, and expensive corned beef,” and “innutritious and indigestible ham and bacon.” Worse than all, the unhappy directors “must needs, of all miserable and doubtful food, sell—pork sausages;” and not only pork sausages, but wheaten bread; and not only wheaten bread—tell it not in Seven Dials!—but absolutely “pander to the wretched drunkard’s appetite for stimulating, innutritious, unhealthy, and expensive food,” by letting their customers have beef-steaks! “Now,” says the _Echo_, “allowing all of Mr. Nunn’s premises—and we gladly allow many of them—we think he is going a little too far, and certainly a good deal too fast. To attempt to entirely alter the food proclivities of the British workman while the experiment of the coffee public-house is yet unsolved, would, we humbly think, be decidedly of that character. It might be perfectly true that pork sausages and wheaten bread are not the most theoretically nutritious of food, and that they provoke thirst. Yet we fancy if the journeyman bricklayer could not get them in the coffee-house, he would seek them in the public-house, which it is the object of the directors of the former to win him away from. When one has to choose between gin and beef we fancy even Mr. Nunn would agree that the latter is of two evils the least. Accordingly we think that to a more convenient season it would be well to relegate the reformation of the coffee public-houses bill of fare.” CHAPTER V. A FORTUNE MADE BY TEETOTALISM.