stocting-weavers, glove-weavers, and shoe-makers. The latter categories are, with the exception of the stocking-weavers, exclusively town-dwellers. It was made a rule in the inquiry to select in each category the most healthy families, and those comparatively in the best circumstances.
As a general result it was found that “in only one of the examined classes of in-door operatives did the average nitrogen-supply just exceed, while in another it nearly reached, the estimated standard of bare sufficiency [i.e., sufficient to avert starvation diseases], and that in two classes there was defect—in one a very large defect—of both nitrogen and carbon. Moreover, as regards the examined families of the agricultural population, it appeared that more than a fifth were with less than the estimated sufficiency of carbonaceous food, that more than one third were with less than the estimated sufficiency of nitrogeneous food, and that in three counties (Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire), insufficiency of nitrogenous food was the average local diet.”[1] Among the Agricultural labourers, those of England, the wealthiest part of the United Kingdom, were the worst fed.[2] The insufficiency of food among the agricultural labourers, fell, as a rule, chiefly on the women and children, for “the man must eat to do his work.” Still greater penury ravaged the town-workers examined. “They are so ill fed that assuredly among them there must be many cases of severe and injurious privation.”[3] (“Privation” of the capitalist all this! i.e., “abstinence” from paying for the means of subsistence absolutely necessary for the mere vegetation of his hands.’’)
The following table shows the conditions of nourishment of the above-named categories of purely town-dwelling work-people, as compared with the minimum assumed by Dr. Smith, and with the food-allowance of the cotton operatives during the time of their greatest distress:
