form his labour … of food than the other members of the family, including in the poorer districts nearly all the meat and bacon.… The quantity of food obtained by the wife and also by the children at the period of rapid growth, is in many cases, in almost every county, deficient, and particularly in nitrogen.”[1] The male and female servants living with the farmers themselves are sufficiently nourished. Their number fell from 288,277 in 1851, to 204,962 in 1861. “The labour of women in the fields,” says Dr. Smith, “whatever may be its disadvantages,… is under present circumstances of great advantage to the family, since it adds that amount of income which … provides shoes and clothing and pays the rent, and thus enables the family to be better fed.”[2] One of the most remarkable results of the inquiry was that the agricultural labourer of England, as compared with other parts of the United Kingdom, “is considerably the worst fed,” as the appended table shows:
Quantities of Carbon and Nitrogen weekly consumed by an average agricultural adult.
| Carbon, grains. | Nitrogen, grains. | |
| England | 46.673 | 1.594 |
| Wales | 48.354 | 2.031 |
| Scotland | 48.980 | 2.348 |
| Ireland | 43.366 | 2.434.[3] |
- ↑ Public Health, Sixth Report, 1863, pp. 238, 249, 261, 262.
- ↑ l. c., p. 262.
- ↑ l. c., p. 17. The English agricultural labourer receives only ¼ as much milk, and ½ as much bread as the Irish. {{subst:al|Arthur Young}} in his “Tour through Ireland, at the beginning of this century, already noticed the better nourishment of the latter. The reason is simply this, that poor Irish farmer is incomparably more humane than the rich English. As regards Wales, that which is said in the text holds only for the south-west. All the doctors there agree that the increase of the death rate through tuberculosis, scrofula, etc., increases in intensity with the deterioration of the physical condition of the population, and all ascribe this deterioration to poverty. “His (the farm labourer’s) keep is reckoned at about five pence a day, but in many districts it was said to be of much less cost to the farmer,” [himself very poor].… “A morsel of the salt meat or bacon,… salted and dried to the texture of mahogany, and hardly worth the difficult process of assimilation … is used to flavour a large quantity of broth or gruel, of meal and leeks, and day after day this is the labourer’s dinner.” The advance of industry resulted for him, in this harsh and damp climate, in “the abandonment of the solid homespun clothing in favour of the cheap and so-called cotton goods,’ and of stronger
