If men will live on dry bread, poor cheese, salt butter, broiled bacon, and such like parching food, they _will_ find their way to the alehouse--the bane of the lower orders, and the source of half the beggary in the nation. Were we to say that the diet of the English for the greater part of last century consisted of Bread, Beef, and Beer, we should not go far wrong. The London bread was then, as now, poor stuff; “spoiled,” says Buchan, “to please the eye, artificially whitened, yet what most prefer, and the poorer sort will eat no other.” Whenever it could be obtained, beer was the beverage that went with bread, and was drank by young and old. Salt beef and mutton, bacon, salt fish, and butchers’ offal completed the dietary of the multitude. The feeding of the poor in hard seasons exercised the beneficent severely, for the baker’s bill often went far to exhaust the working-man’s earnings. It was easy to recommend the rich to get rid of their scurvy by a resort to vegetable food, but to the poor with their obstinate prejudices, shiftlessness, and ignorance, such a recommendation was a sort of mockery. Deliverance, however, came in a form recommended by pleasantness and economy, namely, in the potato. It is true the tuber had been known long before, but not as an article of free and ordinary consumption. Toward the middle of the century it was discovered that potatoes could be grown cheaply in large quantities, and supply and demand developed together. Women and children especially rejoiced in the new food, whilst the benevolent exulted in the liberal accession to the poor man’s fare. It became a point of duty with Lord and Lady Bountiful to recommend the culture and consumption of potatoes everywhere; and to see how far the substitution of potatoes for bread had extended early in the nineteenth century, we need only refer to the pages of Cobbett, who denounced the change with unwearied virulence as a degradation of humanity. Certainly potatoes are inferior to bread in nutritive value, but in food we have to look for more than mere nutriment; and the general use of the potato went far to purify and ameliorate the blood of the English people. The appearance of the potato as a cheap constituent of common fare, was an argument wherewith Jenner endeavoured to allay apprehensions, that, having stopped smallpox, there would soon be more mouths than food to fill them. To Dunning he wrote, 10th February, 1805-- I have often urged the following argument when too numerous a population has been thrown in my teeth, as one of the ill effects likely to attend vaccination. Who would have thought a century ago, that providence had in store for us that nutritious and excellent vegetable, the potato--that ready made loaf, as it were, which is prepared in higher perfection in the garden of the cottager than in the highly manured soil of the man of opulence. And again to Worthington, 25th April, 1810--