What a gift from Heaven was this extraordinary vegetable--a ready made loaf; reserved, too, till the hour when population, in these realms at least, began first to increase; and then coming we scarcely know how. Away with Malthus and his dreary speculations! The skies are filled with benevolence, and let population increase how it may, let us not distrust and suppose that men will ever pick the bones of each other.[84] Nor was the change in the people’s diet limited to the introduction of the potato; with it came tea. Of course we know that tea was drank in England long ere George III. was King, but it was in his days that tea came into popular use. Here again we may refer to Buchan, who was strongly opposed to the innovation. He wrote-- It is said the inhabitants of Great Britain consume more tea than all the other nations of Europe together. The higher ranks use tea as a luxury, while the lower orders make a diet of it. The lowest woman in England must have her tea, and the children generally share it with her. The mischiefs occasioned by tea arise chiefly from its being substituted for solid food, and had I time to spare, I think it could not be better employed than in writing against the destructive drug. Its use will induce a total change in the constitutions of the people of this country. Indeed, it has gone a great way towards effecting that evil already. What Buchan had not time to do, Cobbett subsequently did, and some of his most racy patches of vituperation were applied to tea and tea-drinkers. In Bacon, Bread and Beer, according to Cobbett, consisted the strength of the English working-man, whilst tea and potatoes he held in abomination. To this partial substitution of potatoes and tea for salted animal food and malt liquor, we may justly attribute the reduction of the scorbutic habit of the people, and that improvement of health which were coincident with the close of last century and were continued into the present. What every student of vital statistics has to remember is, that conditions have to be identical to yield identical results. The lives of the majority of the English people last century, and notably so in London, were hard and sordid to a degree which in these times is difficult to realise. Their sanitary conditions have been indicated, and I would now enforce the observation, that they were ill fed and insufficiently fed; consequently their diseases were malignant, and smallpox not unfrequently scarred deeply its scorbutic victims. Wherefore to run a parallel between the Londoners of the 18th century and the English of the 19th in the matter of smallpox, and to ascribe any difference between them to Jenner’s specific, is to display ignorance that is inexcusable, or craft unscrupulous. FOOTNOTES: [76] “On the Uses and Defects of Parish Registers.” By G.M. Burrows, M.D. In _London Medical Repository_, No. 58, October 1818.