In a cold climate fuel is nearly as important as food, for which indeed it is a substitute. A large portion of our daily food is used up in supporting that internal fire by which the heat of the human body in every climate, and under every variety of external temperature, is maintained at the 98th degree of Fahrenheit. The greater the loss of heat by cooling, the greater the amount of heat which the body itself must generate to maintain its temperature at this elevated point. This demand for additional heat cannot be supplied without additional quantities of food, and unless these supplies are afforded, the substance of the body itself, its very tissues and organs, are consumed; a process which cannot be continued long without exhaustion, disease, and death. The phrase “starved by cold” expresses a more literal fact than is commonly understood. Unhappily the circumstances which deprive a population of the means of counteracting cold limit also the supplies of food at their command, and the pressure of the twofold privation, want of food and want of fuel, commonly occurs at the very season when both these indispensable supports of life are most needed. Some conception may be formed of the suffering to which our ancestors were exposed from this cause, from the fact that their prejudice against the use of coal as an article of fuel was such that a law was passed rendering it a capital offence to burn it within the City, and there is a record in the Tower importing that a person was tried, convicted, and executed for this offence in the reign of Edward the First. It was not until the reign of Charles the First that there was a regular supply of coals to London. The habits of the people increased the force of these privations. Intemperance was a national vice. Excessive carousing at home, or days and nights spent in taverns, was the usual practice among all classes, and the physical and moral evils resulting from the custom were neither redeemed nor lessened by the epithet which these habitual convivialities appear to have conferred upon the nation of “Merrie England.” Caius, indeed, one of the most celebrated physicians of the sixteenth century, couples Germany and the Netherlands with England in this common reproach. “These three nations,” he says, “destroy more meats and drynkes without all order, convenient time, reason, and necessitie, than all other countries under the son, to the great annoyance of their bodies and wittes.”