I pass, secondly, to consider the present inadequate supply of milk to the peasantry and country people generally. It is not commonly known that the English peasantry get, as a rule, and in many parts of the country, less milk than the population of the towns. The swine are really better off in many instances.
Buttermilk should be used, and proves most wholesome and nutritious. When the gentry in any neighborhood are supplied with milk, little remains for the poorer folks to buy, and much of what they get is either doled out, as a form of charity, from the dairies of the rich, and is already skimmed, or too little for their real wants and requirements remains available for purchase.
The results of this milk-starvation in the country are readily observed; the children suffer much from want of good milk, and, hardly less, many of the adults. Milk and meat are rare commodities among the peasantry who are not so situated as to secure supplies on the estates of their masters. The loss of meat can be far better borne than that of milk. A good supply of vegetables, with cheese and onions, will make up for loss of much animal food, especially if wholesome brown, or whole meal, bread be eaten. The fact that the best bread, as it is termed, is so largely used by the poor, has often been shown to be due to the erroneous belief that the whitest bread is more wholesome and "goes further" than that made from "seconds" flour. A diet of this "best" bread and a scanty allowance of skimmed milk is, in truth, a very poor and ill-nourishing one. The strange fact remains that pampered servants, and the lower orders generally, prefer this poor stuff because it is called the best, while their betters, who eat darker-colored, or whole-meal bread, have no influence whatever in setting them a better example. It must strike all trained observers that there is a great deal of anæmia among the poorer country-folks, even in the healthiest districts, and much of this I believe to be due to errors in diet, and some of it to insufficient use of milk.
It comes to this, therefore—a large increase in our milk-supply is absolutely called for. It seems certain that our farmers can no longer grow cereals so as to make them a source of profit, or to meet the wants of our population. America, Canada, and India can always meet our deficiencies. Our corn-fields are rapidly being laid down in permanent pasture, but the herds of grazing-cattle we were wont to see are gradually dwindling away. Cattle-plague and various murrains explain this lamentable fact. But are these henceforth to prevail to such an extent as to curtail our home-growth of beef and our milk production? I, for one, sincerely trust not, and I hope I am not too sanguine when I express the belief that the time is not far distant when, by a large, a very large, increase in our grazing-stocks, we may at least meet the crying want of a much better milk-supply for the whole country.—The Practitioner.
