years later, an American humbug, the baronised Yankee, Benjamin Thompson (alias Count Rumford) followed the same line of philanthropy to the great satisfaction of God and man. His “Essays” are a cookery book with receipts of all kinds for replacing by some succedaneum the ordinary dear food of the labourer. The following is a particularly successful receipt of this wonderful philosopher: “5 lbs. of barley meal, 7½d.; 5 lbs. of Indian corn, 6¼d.; 3d. worth of red herring, 1d. salt, 1d. vinegar, 2d. pepper and sweet herbs, in all 20¾d.; make a soup for 64 men, and at the medium price of barley and of Indian corn … this soup may be provided at ¼d, the portion of 20 ounces.”[1] With the advance of capitalistic production, the adulteration of food rendered Thompson’s ideal superfluous.[2] At the end of the 18th and during the first ten years of the 19th century, the English farmers and landlords enforced the absolute minimum of wage, by paying the agricultural labourers less than the minimum in the form of wages, and the remainder in the shape of parochial relief. An example of the waggish way in which the English Dogberries acted in their “legal” fixing of a wages tariff: “The squires of Norfolk had dined, says Mr. Burke, when they fixed the rate of wages; the squires of Berks evidently thought the labourers ought not to do so, when they fixed the rate of wages at Speenhamland, 1795.… There they decide that ‘income (weekly) should be 3s. for a
- ↑ Benjamin Thompson: Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical, &c., 8 vols., Lond., 1796-1802, vol. i, p. 288. In his “The State of the Poor, or an History of the Labouring Classes in England, &c.,” Sir F. M. Eden strongly recommends the Rumfordian beggar-soup to workhouse overseers, and reproachfully warns the English labourers that “many poor people, particularly in Scotland, live, and that very comfortably, for months together, upon oat-meal and barley-meal, mixed with only water and salt.” (l. c., vol. i., book i., ch. 2., p. 608.) The same sort of hints in the 19th century, “The most wholesome mixtures of flour having been refused (by the English agricultural labourer) … in Scotland, where education is better, this prejudice is, probably, unknown.” (Charles H. Parry, M.D.: The question of the necessity of the existing Corn Laws considered. London, 1816, p. 69.) This same Parry, however, complains that the English labourer is now (1815) in a much worse condition than in Eden’s time (1787).
- ↑ From the reports of the last Parliamentary Commission on adulteration of means of subsistence, it will be seen that the adulteration even of medicines is the rule, not the exception of England. E.g., the examination of 34 specimens of opium, purchased of as many different chemists in London, showed that 81 were adulterated with poppy heads, wheat-flour, gum, clay, sand, &c. Several did not contain aa atom of morphia.
