Professor Caldwell, of Transylvania University, Kentucky, in one of his vigorously conceived and very instructive essays, inveighs eloquently against the intemperance of his countrymen in eating as well as in drinking, and tells them that one American consumes as much food as two Highlanders or two Swiss, although the latter are among the stoutest of the race. “Intemperate eating,” says he, “is perhaps the most universal fault we commit. We are all guilty of it, not occasionally, but habitually, and almost uniformly, from the cradle to the grave. It is the bane alike of our infancy and youth, our maturity and age. It is infinitely more common than intemperance in drinking; and the aggregate of the mischief it does is greater. For every reeling drunkard that disgraces our country, it contains one hundred gluttons--persons, I mean, who eat to excess and suffer by the practice.” How, indeed, he afterwards exclaims, can the case be otherwise, while children and youth are regularly taught, hired, bribed, or tempted, “to overeat themselves from their birth! Do you ask me for evidence in proof of this charge? Go to our dining-rooms, nurseries, fruit-shops, confectionaries, and pleasure-gardens,--go even to sick-rooms,--and you will find it in abundance. You will witness there innumerable scenes of gormandizing, not only productive of disease in those concerned in them, but in many instances offensive to beholders. The frightful mess often consists of all sorts of eatable materials, that can be collected and crowded together; and its only measure is the endurance of appetite and the capacity of the stomach. Like the ox in rich pasture-ground, or the swine at his swill trough, men stow away their viands until they have neither desire nor room for any more. I do not say that such eating matches always and every where occur among us. But I do say that they occur too frequently, and that they form fit subjects for caricature pictures, by European tourists, of our domestic manners. I add, however, that similar scenes present themselves in every country I have visited, where provisions are abundant and cheap.”[40]