Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 7/The Apostle of Exigency
THE APOSTLE OF EXIGENCY.
Who, of the present generation, knows anything of Count Rumford? At the mention of his name everybody thinks of stoves. In most people’s minds there is a sort of wonder whether he could be a real Count if his business in life was—stoves. Some of us elders of our day had fathers who knew Count Rumford, and who remembered and talked of him, not in connection with stoves, but as a nobleman of great knowledge, of an active inquiring spirit, of great administrative faculty, and the most indefatigable, resolute, vigilant and enterprising benevolence. Whenever society needs the largest amount of comfort at the smallest cost, the name and memory of Count Rumford come up again. In times of ordinary prosperity, when our workpeople are well employed and paid, and our gentry gather new luxuries about them, and entertain their minds with study and speculation, the man is forgotten, or spoken of only for this or that invention. When we have a particularly bad harvest, or any commercial adversity which throws millions of destitute people on our hands to be fed and cheered, Count Rumford’s name is heard where old people are talking together of the black years of their lives. There may be less and less of this as the old folks pass away; but it will be a good while yet before there is nobody left to quote the sayings and doings of the large-hearted and practical-minded man who fed the hungry in four countries of Christendom, and showed how the greatest number could be nourished and cheered at the smallest cost. He was an American citizen, active and charitable in the War of Independence. This made him a soldier. It was not from his military tastes that he entered the Bavarian service, but because that country was in a wretched condition,—in extreme need of a good soldiery amidst the revolutionary period in Europe, but too poor to support an army,—or indeed any other class. Count Rumford believed he could do something towards retrieving the military system at least; and he retrieved the whole economy of Bavaria. Then he came to England, and till the end of the century instructed our fathers in the ways of economy and comfort,—cut off as our country was by war from the intercourses by which nations help one another forward in civilisation. Then, in 1802, he married the widow of Lavoisier, the great chemist, and was as good a citizen in France as he had been everywhere else; and there he died just when the Emperor departed for Elba and the Bourbons returned.
The present Emperor gets great praise just now for the soldiers’ gardens, at the camp at Châlons; and we have been for some time congratulating ourselves on our regimental schools, and on the improved diet in barrack and camp; and we exclaim “how delightful!” when we hear of the plan of gardens laid out in Indian garrisons, and talked of here; but Count Rumford had done these very things with complete success eighty years ago.
He desired, considering the circumstances of the Bavarian State and population, to make the soldiers as much of citizens as possible, and to fit the citizens to become soldiers, in case of need. He obtained authority to do what he would: and in a little while the barracks were clean, well-aired, and bright-looking, outside and in; the soldiers were in school some part of the day; and their children and the peasantry, or town children were welcomed to the schools also; so that they were always full. The State paid for the books and writing-materials; and the copy-books were afterwards used for cartridges, which saved their cost. The gardens were, however, a still better school to such idle rascals as the soldiers were at the outset of the experiment. Every man who would till his ground had 365 square yards, with tools, an allowance of manure, and his old uniform for a working dress. Potatoes and other good vegetables, were almost unknown among the ignorant and slow peasantry of the country. The soldiers soon learned to enjoy the luxury of good vegetables, and the profit of selling them. When they had reached that point, Count Rumford instituted a plan of long furloughs, by which his soldiers introduced their new discoveries in the rural districts, and moreover they got married in their own neighbourhood,—to the great advantage of the morals of their regiments. During their absence other young men were getting into training; and thus, in a few years, the Bavarian soldier had introduced improvements, order, and discipline into rural life, and the Bavarian peasant had become not only a man of the world, but actually a better husbandman than if he had never attended to anything else. The same advantages were obtained by the townspeople; for there were industrial schools as well as gardens, so that every soldier, and all his sons, had the means of learning some handicraft, with the privilege of making profit by their craft in their leisure hours.
The soldiers were paid 2¾d. per day for food: and it was surprising, even to Count Rumford himself, to see how stout and healthy the men were upon such an allowance, out of which they even treated themselves with beer and tobacco. The odd three farthings were kept for these indulgences. The men, being left to their own devices about food, formed themselves into messes of twelve, one of whom was a non-commissioned officer who took the head of the table, and the lead in the affairs of the mess. They had been shown the wonderful effect of good cookery in increasing the amount of nourishment in food; and thus it was that they made their twopences go so far. In England, at the end of the last century, the people generally supposed that twopenn’orth of food was twopenn’orth of food—all the same thing, whatever it might be: so the labourer’s wife cut up a loaf among the children, and bade them go and eat it; and she and her husband ate their dry slices without any pleasure; and they were all soon hungry again. They could not understand, or would not believe, that the French prisoners in our military prisons obtained satisfying and agreeable meals for the same cost as this dry bread. These Frenchmen understood the virtues of barleymeal, and of the process of stewing, and how to make the most of bread itself; and instead of a bit of a loaf, they had a savoury soup, flavoured with a red herring, in balls with bread crumbs—a substantial, hot, nourishing soup, at the cost of a lump of dry bread.
This was the way the Bavarian soldiers went to work,—making as much a point of skilful cookery as of good materials. They had a beef stew, with soup and savoury dumplings—enough for the day’s food, a little under 2d. a head. Other days they had eggs instead of the beef, made, with bread, butter, flour, and condiments, into dumplings and soup, eaten together. They seem to have been strangely fond of liver; for they had liver dumplings as well as fried liver and liver soup. There were many variations in their bill of fare; but the steady rate was from 19 to 25 lbs. of food, without the supper bread, provided for each mess of twelve, at a cost of 2d. or less per man.
In England, when the Count was here, provisions of all kinds were excessively dear; yet he undertook to establish eating-houses which should be self-supporting, and which should furnish meals at a cost which might well astonish the English world of his day. He did it by his knowledge of economy of heat, as well as by his other experience. The cost of firewood in Bavaria must have been striking to a man fresh from America, where the forests were at that time in everybody’s way, and it was rather a service than not to cut down a tree to cook a supper in the woods. In Bavaria, the way of shutting up the fire, to economise the heat, must have caught his eye at once; and for many years he studied the economy of heat till he got his name associated for ever with stoves.
His eating-rooms were to be well warmed, and his meals for 1500 people capitally cooked by an amount of fuel which, according to the custom of the day in England, would hardly have warmed a middle-class kitchen. The large scale, permitting all the advantages of wholesale prices and the using up of all scraps, was another cause of the cheapness. But, whichever way it was looked at, it was remarkable at a time when the middle classes were almost as much alarmed as the lower about how they were to live, on account of the dearness of all kinds of provisions.
The dietary comprised four dishes or messes, at 1d., 2d., 4d., and 6d. There was a room appropriated to each kind,—these four spacious apartments being well warmed and lighted, and the meals served in comfort. The penny meal consisted of twenty ounces, or a pint and a quarter of soup, made of barley, peas, potatoes, bread, and seasoning. The twopenny meal, of the same weight and measure, was a capital pea-soup with fried bread. The fourpenny was a soup like the second on the list, with two ounces of bacon shred fine, and fried bread. The sixpenny was a stew of beef and vegetables, with a quarter of a pound of bread.
There was an addition to the plan, of reading-rooms and sitting-rooms where any cleanly work could be carried on; these rooms to be open to the regular diners at the establishment; but my present business with the Count is as the greatest nourisher of the poor at the smallest cost on record.
His largest experiment is the most wonderful—his dealings with the beggars of Bavaria. Neither I nor any one else can for a moment associate our Lancashire, or Scotch, or Irish sufferers with any beggars, and especially with the Bavarian mendicants of that day. There is nothing now known like the Bavarian beggars of eighty years ago. Even in the Papal territory, the mendicants are few and modest and decent compared with those precious subjects of the Elector when Count Rumford went among them. I have not room to describe them at length; and it would not be at all an agreeable picture. It is enough to say that the law itself quailed before them, and that they made life a curse in that country. Foreigners and natives, young and old, men, women, and children, they swarmed in town and country till no citizen could call anything his own. In the rural districts they broke into the homesteads, pulled up the farm produce, stole the fowls, waylaid the farmers, stripped the labourers and their cottages, and made themselves at home wherever they pleased to enter. In the towns, nobody could cross the street without paying to be allowed to pass. In the shops, seller and customers were alike at their wits’ end, for the beggars filled the place and mobbed the windows, and would be bought off or would help themselves. They followed the merchant or banker into his dining-room, and would not let him eat his meal in peace. Everything that was left about in the house was stolen; the public walks were impassable, except for soldiers or beggars. Perhaps the most striking circumstance was that these beggars so infested the churches that even worship was hindered. They would so molest the citizens in the midst of the prayers that to empty one’s pocket was the only way to pray in peace.
No,—there was one thing worse, as I now remember. These wretches stole the infants of the citizens, and put out their eyes, or dislocated their limbs, or starved them—(and they starved even their own children)—to work upon the public compassion. Enough! It is easy to see that when society had once become afraid to refuse alms, a large proportion of it would turn beggars. Shepherds, artisans, children, and all the women below the rank of lady asked alms and got them; so that employers repaid themselves for their enforced donations by reducing wages in proportion to the begging talents of their servants and labourers. The town and country were divided into beats, commanded by companies of mendicants; and alliances between rival bands were cemented by marriages between the children of eminent beggars. The population of the capital was then 60,000. In one week after Count Rumford undertook to deal with the beggars, 2600 were entered on his list; and within four years, 10,000 had been arrested and dealt with.
I cannot give the whole story of Count Rumford’s proceedings. I need only say that within a short time the vagrants were all registered, housed, employed, well fed and made comfortable, and the children educated, at incalculably less expense than their mendicancy had cost the community. Everybody was willing and thankful to contribute in return for relief from the scourge of their lives. 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.
The twenty thousand inhabitants have a more precarious subsistence than the inhabitants of almost any other part of the United Kingdom. Their soil is barren, except in a few valleys, and at the heads of the interior lochs; and from the mountains the traveller may see how scanty is the tillage. There are strips of cultivation in the levels and by the margin of the lakes, and patches here and there on the moorlands; and there are a few scattered farms, very poor, and difficult to manage. The climate is such that nothing is attempted beyond oats and potatoes. These and the fishery constitute the maintenance of the country and shore people; and the tradesfolk depend, of course, on the custom of their neighbours. Everything that is imported is dear; and almost everything is imported,—even to butchers’ meat. Peat from the moorland is the fuel used. It is not many years since the resources of the island failed, and the people were reduced to the most dreadful straits before we heard of their condition. It was a terrible spectacle, we were then told, to see the famine-stricken crowds snatching from one another the shell-fish on the shore,—the only thing they had to eat. There was a large emigration from Skye that year; and, as soon as the misery of the place was heard of, provisions were shipped thither.
The same thing must be done now, and without delay. The oats have almost altogether failed to ripen this year; and a considerable proportion has never been cut at all. It lies swamped under the snow. The potatoes are the main resource of the people, from autumn to midsummer, and the potatoes are this season a mere mass of putridity. The inhabitants are sitting amidst their hurricanes, and hail, and snow, without fire as well as without food; for the continual rains of this year have so flooded the moorland that no peat could be got. The ministers of Skye are in despair about saving the people without immediate help; and already the children are down in measles, and their parents wasting away in low fever. The fever is creeping on from house to house, and from village to village. Such is the account which lies before me, from the hand of the minister of Sleat. The name will call up recollections in the minds of tourists, who may perhaps feel that their summer pleasures so far bind them to the place and people as to constitute some sort of obligation to help them in their fearful stress. In the absence of a Count Rumford, we must use our own wits about how to go to work: and we ought to have both wit and heart enough to ship off some cargoes of potatoes, meal, and fuel (peat if possible, to suit the island-hearths). Unless this is done, there will be something worse in Skye than we have been dreading in Lancashire.
Will some one go, and cross that strip of stormy sea, and learn the extent of the need, and show us how to meet it, in the quickest and best way? If so, that explorer will look back, all his life, on that winter trip with more satisfaction than on any autumn touring, from the peaks of the Alps to the depths of Mammoth caves.