The butchers and bakers filled the town carts which daily stopped at their doors,—thankful to bestow their odds and ends of meat and bread, instead of the joints and loaves which had been extorted from them hitherto. All subscriptions for the poor, public and private, were stopped as soon as all the mendicants were collected, and the tribute was directed towards the state charity now instituted. At first, gifts of soup, as well as of materials, were received; but Count Rumford’s soup was presently found to be so superior to any that came from private kitchens that the latter was declined.
The tables of the meals, and of the number and quality of the people who partook of them, are before me: and I see that a dinner of stew, vegetables of three kinds, condiments and bread for 1000 persons, was cooked by wood (when fuel was excessively dear) of the value of 4½d. The stout people had stirabout and buttermilk for breakfast; the sick and aged and children had bread with their milk,—1220 persons for 5l. 18s. 8½d. The dinner of beef, broth, and bread for the same 1220 persons cost 14l. 17s., including the cooking and all expenses. A pottage dinner for the same number cost 6l, 9s. 3½d. Supper for 416 delicate people and children cost 19s. 11d. This was in days of high prices, in an inland country where there was little variety of food; and before anything was heard of such fresh combinations as those which now yield so great an amount of nourishment as that, for instance, which is the cheapest known palatable food for a very great number of people; viz., rice and Indian meal boiled together for many hours, with a sufficiency of condiments. Now that we hear so much of the potato-hash, as the favourite part of the Lancashire dietary, we wonder why there was no dish of that sort in Count Rumford’s kitchens. The fact was, potatoes were little grown in Bavaria in those days; but when he came to England, he at once had recourse to them. Rice was probably scarce in Bavaria, for want of access from the sea. In the department of meat, beef seems to have been the only sort used at all, except the bacon which was shred into the soup. In every way we have the advantage. In Germany at this time veal is more eaten than any other meat. Travellers hear of “calf’s flesh” till they long for a leg of mutton to a degree they are ashamed of. The herds of swine in Germany, and the German reputation for hams and sausages, seem to point to a more various dietary than could be commanded eighty years ago. We in England have more mutton than perhaps any other country; and our potato-hash made with mutton is, if well prepared, one of the best dishes that can appear on any table.
The Glasgow kitchens, which I spoke of a few weeks since, show how much more can now be provided for the same denomination of money than could be done in Count Rumford’s time; but there was something so gloriously audacious in his offer to relieve the whole Electorate of its pauperism,—something so new in the extent to which he undertook the feeding of multitudes, from day to day, and something so benevolent in the way in which he went to work,—considering the fortunes and feelings of the vagrants no less than the rights of independent citizens,—that we may consider him an apostle not the less for our being able to do the things that he did somewhat more cheaply. We do it only through the advance that has been made in our food resources within the present century. If he were here now, he would feed and comfort Lancashire and Cheshire within a week, more cheaply than the wisest of us conceive of, and with a completeness which would leave us nothing to apprehend from the consequences of want of common necessaries.
It is possible that a Count Rumford—an apostle of comfort to the destitute—may arise out of the needs of the time; and perhaps I may have been led to the choice of my theme to-day by some vague hope that the revival of the image of Count Rumford may hasten the appearance of some successor, in the crisis of our need. We all rejoice to hear of a sick kitchen in one place; of penny meals and pleasant rooms to eat them in another; and of proposals for a training kitchen elsewhere. We are all glad to hear that in some districts the melancholy sameness of the dole of meal and soup, or bread and soup, is broken up, and that the variety of potato-hash, rice and milk, &c., is introduced. But still, we are but too well aware that the people generally are not sufficiently nourished, and that they do not so enjoy their meals as to derive the full benefit of what they eat. We have not now, thank Heaven! natural philosophers who propose starch for poor men’s diet, because starch comprehends such and such nutritious elements; nor mighty Dukes who come forward, brave in conscious humanity, to recommend a pinch of curry powder in cold water to warm the poor man’s stomach, aching with emptiness. We have not to blush for this kind of display of humanity; but neither have we as yet a Count Rumford who would ask of us only our money and our help, in order to ensure a full and comfortable support to every sufferer in Lancashire till the mills are going again. We would readily forgive any appearance of military drill in his methods, at such an hour as the present, in consideration of the security he would certainly give us that nobody should die of hunger, or of fever as a consequence of hunger, if only we would provide the money, and would give him the spending of it. If a Count Rumford the Second would present himself to-day, we would make sure of his name being known in the next century more widely and more familiarly than that of his predecessor.
If we had such a “guide, philosopher and friend” at this moment, we must give him something more than even the area of our cotton manufacture to manage. We must, be the Lancashire pressure what it might, take him to the Island of Skye.—Yes, even so; though it is no trifle to cross the turbulent Northern seas, and land on the Hebrides in winter. The melancholy truth is that unless we do, in heart and in purse, cross that stormy sea, and visit Skye without delay, the sounding shores of that solemn island will be strewn with the silent dead by the time the winter is over. According to the latest accounts, the state of things in Skye is this.
