 No. 3 of Cottage Economy by William Cobbett. Little time need be spent in dwelling on the necessity of this article to all families, though on account of the modern custom of using potatoes to supply the place of bread, it seems necessary to say a few words here on the subject which, in another work, I have so amply, and I think so triumphantly, discussed. I am the more disposed to revive the subject for a moment in this place, from having read, in the evidence recently given before the Agricultural Committee, that many labourers, especially in the west of England, use potatoes instead of bread to a very great extent, and I find from the same evidence that it is the custom to allot to labourers a potato ground, in part payment of their wages. This has a tendency to bring English labourers down to the state of the Irish, whose mode of living as to food is but one removed from that of the pig, and of the ill-fed pig, too. I was, in reading the above-mentioned evidence, glad to find that Mr Edward Wakefield, the best-informed and most candid of all the witnesses, gave it as his opinion that the increase which had taken place in the cultivation of potatoes was injurious to the country, an opinion which must, I think, be adopted by everyone who takes the trouble to reflect a little upon the subject, for, leaving out of the question the sluffily and beastly habits engendered amongst the labouring classes by constantly lifting their principal food at once out of the earth to their mouths, by eating without the necessity of any implements other than the hands and the teeth, and by dispensing with everything requiring skill in the preparation of the food, and requiring cleanliness in its consumption or preservation. Leaving these out of the question, though they are all matters of great moment, when we consider their effects in the rearing of a family, we shall find that in mere quantity of food, that is to say of nourishment, bread is the preferable diet. An acre of land that will produce three hundred bushels of potatoes will produce thirty-two bushels of wheat. I state this as an average fact, and I'm not at all afraid of being contradicted by anyone well acquainted with husbandry. The potatoes are supposed to be of a good sort, as it is called, and the wheat may be supposed to weigh sixty pounds a bushel. It is a fact clearly established that, after the water, the stringy substance, and the earth are taken from the potato, there remains only one-tenth of the rough, raw weight of nutritious matter, or matter which is deemed equally nutritious with bread, and as the raw potatoes weigh fifty-six pounds a bushel, the acre will yield one-thousand eight-hundred and thirty pounds of nutritious matter. Now, mind, a bushel of wheat weighing sixty pounds will make of household bread, that is to say taking out only the bran, sixty-five pounds. Thus the acre yields two-thousand and eighty pounds of bread. As to the expenses, the seed and act of planting are about equal in the two cases. But, while the potatoes must have cultivation during their growth, the wheat needs none, and while the wheat straw is worth from three to five pounds an acre, the home of the potatoes is not worth one single truss of that straw. Then, as to the expense of gathering, housing, and keeping the potato crop, it is enormous, besides the risk of loss by frost, which may be safely taken on average at a tenth of the crop. Then comes the expense of cooking. The thirty-two bushels of wheat, supposing a bushel to be baked at a time, which would be the case in a large family, would demand thirty-two heatings of the oven. Suppose a bushel of potatoes to be cooked every day in order to supply the place of this bread, then we have nine hundred boilings of the pot, unless cold potatoes be eaten at some of the meals, and in that case the diet must be cheering indeed. Think of the labour, think of the time, think of all the peelings and scrapings and washings and messings attending these nine hundred boilings of the pot. For it must be a considerable time before English people can be brought to eat potatoes in the Irish style, that is to say, scratch them out of the earth with their paws, toss them into a pot without washing, and when boiled, turn them out upon a dirty board, and then sit round that board, peel the skin and dirt from one at a time, and eat the inside. Mr. Cowan was delighted with Irish hospitality, because the people there received no parish relief, upon which I can only say that I wish him the exclusive benefit of such hospitality. I have here spoken of a large quantity of each of the sorts of food. I will now come to a comparative view, more immediately applicable to a labourer's family. When wheat is ten shillings the bushel, potatoes bought at best hand, I'm speaking of the country generally, are about two shillings a bushel. Last spring the average price of wheat might be six and sixpence, and the average price of potatoes in small quantities was about eighteen pence, though by the wagon-load I saw potatoes bought at a shilling a bushel to give to sheep, then observed these were of the coarsest kind, and the farmer had to fetch them at a considerable expense. I think therefore that I give the advantage to the potatoes when I say that they sell, upon an average, for full a fifth part as much as the wheat sells for, per bushel, while they contain four pounds less weight than the bushel of wheat, while they yield only five pounds and a half of nutritious matter equal to bread, and while the bushel of wheat will yield sixty-five pounds of bread, besides the ten pounds of bran. Hence it is clear that instead of that saving, which is everlastingly dinden I is, from the use of potatoes, there is a waste of more than one half. Seeing that when wheat is ten shillings the bushel, you can have sixty-five pounds of bread for the ten shillings, and can have out of potatoes only five pounds and a half of nutritious matter equal to bread for two shillings. This being the case, I trust that we shall soon hear no more of those savings which the labourer makes by the use of potatoes. I hope we shall, in the words of Dr. Drennan, leave Ireland to her lazy route, if she chooses still to adhere to it. It is the route also of slovenliness, filth, misery, and slavery. Its cultivation has increased in England with the increase of the paupers. Both, I thank God, are upon the decline. Englishmen seem to be upon the return to beer and bread from water and potatoes, and therefore I shall now proceed to offer some observations to the cottager calculated to induce him to bake his own bread. As I have before stated, sixty pounds of wheat, that is to say, where the Winchester bushel weighs sixty pounds, will make sixty-five pounds of bread, besides the leaving of about ten pounds of bran. This is household bread made of flour from which the bran only has taken. If you make fine flour, you take out pollard, as they call it, as well as bran, and then you have a smaller quantity of bread and a greater quantity of offal, but even of this finer bread, bread equal in fineness to the baker's bread, you get from fifty-eight to fifty-nine pounds out of the bushel of wheat. Now, let us see how many quarter-loaves you get out of the bushel of wheat, supposing it to be fine flour in the first place. You get thirteen quarter-loaves and a half. These cost you, at the present average price of wheat, seven and six pounds of bushel, in the first place, seven shillings and sixpence, then thruppence for yeast, then not more than thruppence for grinding, because you have about thirteen pounds of offal, which is worth more than a heapenny a pound, while the grinding is ninepence a bushel. Thus, then, the bushel of bread of fifty-nine pounds costs you eight shillings, and it yields you the weight of thirteen and a half quarter-loves. These quarter-loves now, December 1821, sell at Kensington at the baker's shop at one shilling heapenny. That is to say, the thirteen quarter-loves and a half cost fourteen shillings, seven and a half pence. I omitted to mention the salt, which would cost you fourpence more, so that here is six shillings, three and a half pence, saved upon the baking of a bushel of bread. The baker's quarter-loaf is indeed cheaper in the country than at Kensington, by probably a penny in the loaf, which would still, however, leave a saving of five shillings upon the bushel of bread. But, besides this, pray think a little of the materials of which the baker's loaf is comprised. The alum, the ground potatoes, and other materials, it being a notorious fact that the bakers, in London at least, have mills wear into grind their potatoes, so large is the scale upon which they use that material. It is probable that, out of a bushel of wheat, they make between sixty and seventy pounds of bread, though they have no more flour, and of course no more nutritious matter, than you have in your fifty-nine pounds of bread. But, at the least, supposing their bread to be as good as yours in quality, you have, allowing a shilling for the heating of the oven, a clear four shillings saved upon every bushel of bread. If you consume half a bushel a week, that is to say, about a quarter in an overday, this is a saving of five pounds four shillings a year, or a full sixth part, if not a fifth part, of the earnings of a labourer in husbandry. How wasteful, then, and indeed how shameful, for a labourer's wife to go to the baker's shop, and how negligent, how criminally careless, of the welfare of his family must the labourer be who permits so scandalous a use of the proceeds of his labour. But I have hitherto taken a view of the matter the least possibly advantageous to the home-baked bread. For ninety-nine times out of a hundred the fuel for heating the oven costs very little. The hedges, the copses, the woodmen of all descriptions have fuel for little or nothing. At any rate, to heat the oven cannot, upon an average, take the country through, cost the labourer more than six pence a bushel. Then again, fine flour need not ever be used, and ought not to be used. This adds six pounds of bread to the bushel, or nearly another quart and loaf and a half, making nearly fifteen quart and loaves out of the bushel of wheat. The finest flour is by no means the most wholesome, and at any rate there is more nutritious matter in a pound of household bread than in a pound of baker's bread. Besides this, rye, and even barley, especially when mixed with wheat, make very good bread. Few people upon the face of the earth live better than the long islanders, yet nine families out of ten seldom eat wheat and bread. Rye is the flour that they principally make use of. Now, rye is seldom more than two-thirds the price of wheat, and barley is seldom more than half the price of wheat. Half rye and half wheat, taking out a little more of the offal, make very good bread. Half wheat, a quarter rye and a quarter barley, nay, one-third of each, make bread that I could be very well content to live upon all my lifetime. And even barley alone, if the barley be good, and none but the finest flour taken out of it, has in it, measure for measure, ten times the nutrition of potatoes. Indeed, the fact is well known that our forefathers used barley bread to a very great extent. Its only fault with those who dislike it is its sweetness, a fault which we certainly have not defined with the baker's loaf, which has in it little more of the sweetness of grain than is to be found in the offal which comes from the soings of deal-boards. The nutritious nature of barley is amply proved by the effect, and very rapid effect, of its meal in the fatting of hogs and of poultry of all descriptions. They will fatten quicker upon meal of barley than upon any other thing. The flesh, too, is sweeter than that preceding from any other food, with the exception of that which precedes from buckwheat, a grain little used in England. That preceding from Indian corn is indeed still sweeter and finer, but this is wholly out of the question with us. I am by and by to speak of the cow to be kept by the labourer in husbandry. Then there will be milk to wet the bread with, and exceedingly great improvement in its taste as well as in its quality. This, of all the ways of using skim milk, is the most advantageous, and this great advantage must be wholly thrown away if the bread of the family be bought at the shop. With milk, bread with very little wheat in it may be made far better than baker's bread. And leaving the milk out of the question, taking a third of each sort of grain, you would get bread weighing as much as fourteen quart in loaves for about five shillings and nine pence at present prices of grain, that is to say you would get it for about five pence a quart in loaf, all expenses included. Thus you have nine pounds and ten ounces of bread a day for about five shillings and nine pence a week. Here is enough for a very large family. Very few labourers' families can want so much as this, unless indeed there be several persons in it capable of earning something by their daily labour. Here is cut and come again. Here is bread always for the table, bread to carry a field, always a hunch of bread ready to put into the hand of a hungry child. We hear a great deal about children crying for bread, and objects of compassion they and their parents are when the latter have not the means of obtaining a sufficiency of bread. But I should be glad to be informed how it is possible for a labouring man who earns upon an average ten shillings a week, who has not more than four children, and if he have more some ought to be doing something, who has a garden of a quarter of an acre of land, for that makes part of my plan, who has a wife as industrious as she ought to be, who does not waste his earnings at the ale-house or the tea-shop. I should be glad to know how such a man, while wheat shall be at the price of about six shillings a bushel, can possibly have children crying for bread. Cry indeed they must if he will persist in giving thirteen shillings for a bushel of bread instead of five shillings and nine pence. Such a man is not to say that the bread which I have described is not good enough. It was good enough for his forefathers, who were too proud to be paupers, that is to say abject and willing slaves. Hogs eat barley. And hogs will eat wheat, too, when they can get at it. Convicts in condemned cells eat wheat and bread, but we think it no degradation to eat wheat and bread, too. I am for depriving the labourer of none of his rights. I would have him oppressed in no manner or shape. I would have him bold and free. But to have him such, he must have bread in his house sufficient for all his family. And whether that bread be fine or coarse must depend upon the different circumstances which present themselves in the cases of different individuals. The married man has no right to expect the same plenty of food and of raiment that the single man has. The time before marriage is the time to lay by, or if the party choose to indulge himself in the absence of labour. To marry is a voluntary act, and it is attended in the result with great pleasures and advantages. If, therefore, the laws be fair and equal, if the state of things be such that a labouring man can, with the usual ability of labourers, and with constant industry, care and sobriety, with decency of deportment towards all his neighbours, cheerful obedience to his employer, and due subordination to the laws, if the state of things be such that such a man's earnings be sufficient to maintain himself and family with food, raiment and lodging needful for them, such a man has no reason to complain. And no labouring man has reason to complain if the numerousness of his family should call upon him for extraordinary exertion, or for frugality and uncommonly rigid. The man with a large family has, if it be not in a great measure his own fault, a greater number of pleasures and of blessings than other men. If he be wise, and just as well as wise, he will see that it is reasonable for him to expect less delicate fares in his neighbours who have a less number of children, or no children at all. He will see the justice as well as the necessity of his resorting to the use of coarser bread, and thus endeavour to make up that, or at least part of that, which he loses in comparison with his neighbours. The quality of the bread ought in every case to be proportioned to the number of the family and the means of the head of that family. Here is no injury to health proposed, but on the contrary the best security for its preservation. Without bread all is misery. The scripture truly calls it the staff of life, and it may be called to the pledge of peace and happiness in the labourer's dwelling. As to the act of making bread it would be shocking indeed if that had to be taught by the means of books. Every woman high or low ought to know how to make bread. If she do not, she is unworthy of trust and confidence, and indeed a mere burden upon the community. Yet it is but too true that many women, even amongst those who have to get their living by their labour, know nothing of the making of bread, and seem to understand little more about it than the part which belongs to its consumption. A Frenchman, a Mr. Cousar, who had been born in the West Indies, told me that till he came to Long Island he never knew how the flower came, that he was surprised when he learnt that it was squeezed out of little grains that had grown at the tops of straw, for that he had always an idea that it was got out of some large substances, like the yams that grow in tropical climates. He was a very sincere and good man, and I am sure he told me truth. And this may be the more readily believed, when we see so many women in England who seem to know no more of the constituent parts of a loaf than they know of those of the moon. Servant women in abundance appear to think that loaves are made by the baker as knights are made by the king, things of their pure creation, a creation too in which no one else can participate. Now, is not this an enormous evil? And whence does it come? Servant women are the children of the labouring classes, and they would all know how to make bread, and know well how to make it too, if they had been fed on bread of their mothers and their own making. How serious a matter then is this, even in this point of view, a servant that cannot make bread is not entitled to the same wages as one that can? If she can neither bake nor brew, if she be ignorant of the nature of flour, yeast, malt, and hops, what is she good for? If she understand these matters well, if she be able to supply her employer with bread and with beer, she is really valuable, she is entitled to good wages, and to consideration and respect into the bargain. But if she be wholly deficient in these particulars, and can merely dawdle about with a bucket and a broom, she can be of very little consequence. To lose her is merely to lose a consumer of food, and she can expect very little indeed in the way of desire to make her life easy and pleasant. Why should anyone have such desire? She is not a child of the family, she is not a relation, any one as well as she can take in a loaf from the baker, or a barrel of beer from the brewer. She has nothing whereby to bind her employer to her. To sweep a room anything is capable of that has got two hands. In short, she has no useful skill, no useful ability, she is an ordinary drudge, and she is treated accordingly. But if such be her state in the house of an employer, what is her state in the house of a husband? The lover is blind, but the husband has eyes to see with. He soon discovers that there is something wanted besides dimples and cherry cheeks, and I would have fathers seriously reflect, and to be well assured, that the way to make their daughters to be long admired, beloved, and respected by their husbands is to make them skillful, able, and active in the most necessary concerns of a family. Eating and drinking come three times every day. The preparations for these, and all the ministry necessary to them, belong to the wife. And I hold it to be impossible that, at the end of two years, a really ignorant, sluttish wife should possess anything worthy of the name of love from her husband. This, therefore, is a matter of far greater moment to the father of a family, than whether the parson of the parish or the Methodist priest be the most evangelical of the two, for it is here a question of the daughter's happiness or misery for life. And I have no hesitation to say that if I were a labouring man, I should prefer teaching my daughters to bake, brew, milk, make butter and cheese, to teaching them to read the Bible till they had got every word of it by heart. And I should think too, nay, I should know, that I was in the former case doing my duty towards God as well as towards my children. When we see a family of dirty, ragged little creatures, let us inquire into the cause, and ninety-nine times out of every hundred, we shall find that the parents themselves have been brought up in the same way. But a consideration which ought of itself to be sufficient is the contempt in which a husband will naturally hold a wife that is ignorant of the matters necessary to the conducting of a family. A woman who understands all the things above mentioned is really a skillful person, a person worthy of respect, and that will be treated with respect too by all but brutish employers or brutish husbands, and such, though sometimes, are not very frequently found. Besides, if natural justice and our own interest had not the weight which they have, such valuable persons will be treated with respect. They know their own worth, and accordingly they are more careful of their character, more careful not to lessen by misconduct the value which they possess from their skill and ability. Thus, then, the interest of the labourer, his health, the health of his family, the peace and happiness of his home, the prospects of his children through life, their skill, their ability, their habits of cleanliness, and even their moral deportment, all combine to press upon him the adoption and the constant practice of this branch of domestic economy. Can she bake, as the question that I always put? If she can, she is worth a pound or two a year more. Is that nothing? Is it nothing for a labouring man to make his four or five daughters worth eight or ten pounds a year more, and that too while he is, by the same means, providing the more plentifully for himself and the rest of his family? The reasons on the side of the thing that I contend for are endless, but if this one motive be not sufficient, I am sure all that I have said and all that I could say must be wholly unavailing. Before, however, I dismiss this subject, let me say a word or two to those persons who do not come under the denomination of labourers. In London, or in any very large town where the space is so confined, and where the proper fuel is not handily to become at and stored for use, to bake your own bread may be attended was too much difficulty. But in all other situations there appears to me to be hardly any excuse for not baking bread at home. If the family consists of twelve or fourteen persons, the money actually saved in this way, even at present prices, would be little short of from twenty to thirty pounds a year. At the utmost, here is only the time of one woman occupied one day in the week. Now, mind, here are twenty-five pounds to be employed in some way different from that of giving it to the baker. If you add five of these pounds to a woman's wages, is that not full as well employed as giving it in wages to the baker's men? Is it not better employed for you? And is it not better employed for the community? It is very certain that if the practice were as prevalent as I could wish, there would be a large deduction from the regular baking population. But would there be any harm if less alum were imported into England, and if some of those youths were left at the plow, who are now bound in apprenticeships to learn the art and mystery of doing that which every girl in the kingdom ought to be taught to do by her mother? It ought to be a maxim with every master and every mistress, never to employ another to do that which can be done as well by their own servants. The more of their money that is retained in the hands of their own people, the better it is for them altogether. Besides, a man of a right mind must be pleased with the reflection that there is a great mass of skill and ability under his own roof. He feels stronger and more independent on this account, all pecuniary advantage out of the question. It is impossible to conceive anything more contemptible than a crowd of men and women living together in a house and constantly looking out of it for people to bring them food and drink, and to fetch their garments to and fro. Such a crowd resemble a nest of unfledged birds, absolutely dependent for their very existence, on the activity and success of the old ones. Yet on men go from year to year in this state of wretched dependence, even when they have all the means of living within themselves which is certainly the happiest state of life that anyone can enjoy. It may be asked, where is the mill to be found? Where is the wheat to be got? The answer is, where is there not a mill? Where is there not a market? There are everywhere, and the difficulty is to discover what can be the peculiar attractions contained in that long and luminous manuscript, a baker's half-yearly bill. With regard to the mill, in speaking of families of any considerable number of persons, the mill has, with me, been more than once a subject of observation in print. I, for a good while, experienced the great inconvenience and expense of sending my wheat and other grain to be ground at a mill. This expense, in case of a considerable family, living at only a mile from a mill, is something, but the inconvenience and uncertainty are great. In my years' residence in America, from paragraphs 1031 and onwards, I give an account of a horse mill which I had in my farmyard, and I showed, I think very clearly, that corn could be ground cheaper in this way than by wind or water, and that it would answer well to grind for sale in this way as well as for home use. Since my return to England, I have seen a mill erected in consequence of what the owner had read in my book. This mill belongs to a small farmer, who, when he cannot work on his land with his horses, or in the season when he has little for them to do, grinds wheat, sells the flour, and he takes in grists to grind as other millers do. This mill goes with three small horses, but what I would recommend to gentlemen with considerable families or to farmers is a mill such as I myself have at present. With this mill, turned by a man and a stout boy, I can grind six bushels of wheat in a day, and dress the flour. The grinding of six bushels of wheat at nine pence bushel comes to four and six pence, which pays the man and the boy, supposing them, which is not, and seldom can be, the case, to be hired for the express purpose out of the street. With the same mill you grind meal for your pigs, and of this you will get eight or ten bushels ground in a day. You have no trouble about sending to the mill, you are sure to have your own wheat, for strange as it may seem, I use sometimes to find that I sent white Essex wheat to the mill, and that it brought me flour from very coarse red wheat. There is no accounting for this except by supposing that wind and water power has something in it to change the very nature of the grain, as when I came to grind by horses, such as the wheat went into the hopper, so the flour came out into the bin. But mine now is only on the petty scale of providing for a dozen of persons and a small lot of pigs. For a farmhouse, or a gentleman's house in the country where there would be room to have a walk for a horse, you might take the labour from the men, clap any little horse, pony, or even ass to the wheel, and he would grind you off eight or ten bushels of wheat in a day, and both he and you would have the thanks of your men into the bargain. The cost of this mill is twenty pounds, the dresser is four more, the horse path and wheel might possibly be four or five more, and I am very certain that to any farmer living at a mile from a mill, and that is less than the average distance perhaps, having twelve persons in family, having forty pigs to feed, and twenty hogs to fatten, the savings of such a mill would pay the whole expenses of it the very first year. Such a farmer cannot send less than fifty times a year to the mill. Think of that in the first place. The elements are not always propitious, sometimes the water fails and sometimes the wind. Many a farmer's wife has been tempted to vent her spleen on both. At best there must be horse and man, or boy, and perhaps cart to go to the mill, and that too observe in all weathers and in the harvest as well as at other times of the year. The case is one of imperious necessity. Neither floods nor droughts, nor storms nor calms, will allay the cravings of the kitchen, nor quiet the clamorous uproar of the stye. Go, somebody must, to some place or other, and back they must come with flour and with meal. One summer many persons came down the country more than fifty miles to a mill that I knew in Pennsylvania, and I have known farmers in England carry their grists more than fifteen miles to be ground. It is surprising that under these circumstances handmills and horsemills should not long ago have become of more general use, especially when one considers that the labour in this case would cost the farmer next to nothing. To grind would be the work of a wet day. There is no farmer who does not at least fifty days in every year exclaim when he gets up in the morning, what shall I set them at today? If he had a mill he would make them pull off their shoes, sweep all out clean, winnow up some corn, if he had it not already done, and grind and dress, and have everything in order. No scolding within doors about the grist, no squeaking in the stye, no boys sent off in the rain to the mill. But there is one advantage which I have not yet mentioned, and which is the greatest of all, namely that you would have the power of supplying your married labourers, your blacksmithsmen sometimes, your wheel-wrightsmen at other times, and indeed the greater part of the persons that you employed, with good flour, instead of their going to purchase their flour after it had passed through the hands of a corn merchant, a miller, a flower merchant, and a huckster, every one of whom does and must have a profit out of the flour, arising from wheat grown upon and sent away from your very farm. I used to let all my people have flour at the same price that they would otherwise have been compelled to give for worse flour. Every farmer will understand me when I say that he ought to pay for nothing in money which he can pay for in anything but money. His maxim is to keep the money that he takes as long as he can. Now here is a most effectual way of putting that maxim in practice to a very great extent. Farmers know well that it is the Saturday night which empties their pockets, and here is the means of cutting off a good half of the Saturday night. The men have better flour for the same money, and still the farmer keeps at home those profits which would go to the maintaining of the dealers in wheat and in flour. The maker of my little mill is Mr. Hill of Oxford Street. The expense is what I have stated it to be. I, with my small establishment, find the thing convenient and advantageous. What then must it be to a gentleman in the country who has room and horses and a considerable family to provide for? The dresser is so contrived as to give you, at once, meal of four degrees of fineness, so that for certain purposes you may take the very finest, and indeed you may have your flour and your bread, of course, of what degree of fineness you please. But there is also a steel mill, much less expensive, requiring less labour, and yet quite sufficient for a family. Mills of this sort, very good, and at a reasonable price, are to be had of Mr. Parks in Centured Street, London. These are very complete things of their kind. Mr. Parks has also excellent malt mills. In concluding this part of my treatise, I cannot help expressing my hope of being instrumental in inducing a part of the labourers at any rate to bake their own bread, and above all things to abandon the use of Ireland's lazy route. Nevertheless so extensive is the erroneous opinion relative to this villainous route that I really began to despair of checking its cultivation and use, till I saw the declaration which Mr. Wakefield had the good sense and the spirit to make before the Agricultural Committee. Be it observed, too, that Mr. Wakefield had himself made a survey of the State of Ireland. What he saw there did not encourage him doubtless to be an advocate for the growing of this route of wretchedness. It is an undeniable fact that, in the proportion that this route is in use as a substitute for bread, the people are wretched. The reasons for which I have explained and enforced a hundred times over. Mr. William Hanning told the committee that the labourers in his part of Somersetshire were almost wholly supplied with potatoes, breakfast and dinner, brought them in the fields, and nothing but potatoes, and that they used in better times to get a certain portion of bacon and cheese, which, on account of their poverty, they do not eat now. It is impossible that men can be contented in such a state of things. It is unjust to desire them to be contented. It is a state of misery and degradation to which no part of any community can have any show of right to reduce another part. Men so degraded have no protection, and it is a disgrace to form part of a community to which they belong. This degradation has been occasioned by a silent change in the value of the money of the country. This has perloined the wages of the labourer. It has reduced him by degrees to house with the spider and the bat, and to feed with the pig. It has changed the habits, and in great measure the character of the people. The sins of this system are enormous and undescribable, but thank God they seem to be approaching to their end. Money is resuming its value, labour is recovering its price, let us hope that the wretched potato is disappearing, and that we shall once more see the knife in the labourer's hand and the loaf upon his board. This was written in 1821. Now, 1823, we have had the experience of 1822, when for the first time the world saw a considerable part of a people plunged into all horrors of famine at a moment when the government of that nation declared food to be abundant. Yes, the year 1822 saw Ireland in this state, saw the people of whole parishes receiving the extreme unction preparatory to yielding up their breath for want of food, and this while large exports of meat and flour were taking place in that country. But, horrible as this was, disgraceful as it was to the name of Ireland, it was attended with this good effect, it brought out from many members of parliament in their places, and from the public in general, the acknowledgement that the misery and degradation of the Irish were chiefly owing to the use of the potato as the almost soul food of the people. In my next number I shall treat of the keeping of cows. I have said that I will teach the cottager how to keep a cow all the year round upon the produce of a quarter of an acre, or in other words, forty rods of land. And in my next I will make good my promise. End of number three. Number four of Cottage Economy by William Cobbett. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Philippa. Paragraphs 101 to 107 Making Bread Continued In the last number, at paragraph 86, I observed that I hoped it was unnecessary for me to give any directions as to the mere act of making bread. But several correspondence inform me that, without these directions, a conviction of the utility of baking bread at home is of no use to them. Therefore I shall here give those directions, receiving my instructions here from one who I thank God does know how to perform this act. Suppose the quantity be a bushel of flour. Put this flour into a trough that people have for the purpose, or it may be in a clean smooth tub of any shape, if not too deep and if sufficiently large. Make a pretty deep hole in the middle of this heap of flour. Take, for a bushel, a pint of good fresh yeast. Mix it and stir it well up in a pint of soft water, milk warm. Pull this into the hole in the heap of flour. Then take a spoon and work it round the outside of this body of moisture, so as to bring into that body, by degrees, flour enough to make it form a thin batter, which you must stir about well for a minute or two. Then take a handful of flour and scatter it thinly over the head of this batter, so as to hide it. Then cover the whole thing over with a cloth to keep it warm, and this covering, as well as the situation of the trough, as to distance from the fire, must depend on the nature of the place and state of the weather as to heat and cold. When you perceive that the batter has risen enough to make cracks in the flour that you covered it over with, you begin to form the whole mass into dough, thus. You begin round the whole containing the batter, working the flour into the batter, and pouring in, as it is wanted, to make the flour mix with the batter, soft water, milk warm, or milk, as hereafter to be mentioned. Before you begin this you scatter the salt over the heap at the rate of half a pound to a bushel of flour. When you have got the whole sufficiently moist, you need it well. This is a grand part of the business, for unless the dough be well worked, there will be little round lumps of flour in the loaves, and besides the original batter, which is to give fermentation to the whole, will not be duly mixed. The dough must therefore be well worked. The fists must go heartily into it. It must be rolled over, pressed out, folded up, and pressed out again, until it be completely mixed, and formed into a stiff and tough dough. This is labour, mind. I've never quite liked baker's bread, since I saw a great heavy fellow in a bakehouse in France, kneading bread with his naked feet. His feet looked very white, to be sure—whether they were of that colour before he got into the trough, I could not tell. God forbid that I should suspect that this is ever done in England. It is labour. But what is exercise other than labour? Let a young woman bake a bushel once a week, and she will do very well without files and galley-pots. Thus then the dough is made, and when made it is to be formed into a lump in the middle of the trough, and with a little dry flour thinly scattered over it, covered over again, to be kept warm and to ferment. And in this state, if all be done rightly, it will not have to remain more than about fifteen or twenty minutes. In the meanwhile the oven is to be heated, and this is much more than half the art of the operation. When an oven is properly heated, can be known only by actual observation. Women who understand the matter know when the heat is right the moment they put their faces within a yard of the oven-mouth, and once or twice observing is enough for any person of common capacity. But this much may be said in the way of rule—that the fuel, I am supposing a brick oven, should be dry, not rotten, wood, and not mere brush wood, but rather faggot sticks. If larger wood it ought to be split up into sticks not more than two or two-and-a-half inches through—bush wood, that is, strong, not green and not too old, if it be hard in its nature and has some sticks in it, may do—the woody parts of furs or ling will heat an oven very well. But the thing is to have a lively and yet somewhat strong fire, so that the oven may be heated in about fifteen minutes, and retain its heat sufficiently long. The oven should be hot by the time that the dough, as mentioned in paragraph 103, has remained in the lump about twenty minutes. When both are ready, take out the fire and wipe the oven out clean, and at nearly about the same moment take the dough out upon the lid of the baking trough, or some proper place, cut it up into pieces and make it up into loaves, kneading it again into these separate parcels, and, as you go on, shaking a little flour over your board to prevent the dough from adhering to it. The loaves should be put into the oven as quickly as possible after they are formed. When in, the oven lid or door should be fastened up very closely, and if all be properly managed, loaves of about the size of cotton loaves will be sufficiently baked in about two hours. But they usually take down the lid and look at the bread in order to see how it is going on. And what is there worthy of the name of plague or trouble in all this? Here is no dirt, no filth, no rubbish, no litter, no slop? And pray what can be pleasanter to behold? Talk indeed of your pantomimes and gaudy shows, your processions and installations and coronations. Give me, for a beautiful sight, a neat and smart woman, heating her oven and setting in her bread. And if the bustle does make the sign of labour glisten on her brow, where is the man that would not kiss that off rather than lick the plaster from the cheek of a duchess? And what is the result? Why, good, wholesome food sufficient for a considerable family for a week, prepared in three or four hours? To get this quantity of food fit to be eaten in the shape of potatoes? How many fires? What a washing, what a boiling, what a peeling, what a slopping, and what a messing. The cottage everlastingly in a litter, the woman's hands everlastingly wet and dirty, the children grime up to the eyes with dust fixed on by potato starch, and ragged as cults, the poor mother's time, all being devoted to the everlasting boilings of the pot. Can any man who knows anything of the labourer's life deny this? And will then anybody accept the old Shufflebridge's band of the quarterly review, who have all their lives been moving from garret to garret, who have seldom seen the sun, and never the dew except in print? Will anybody accept these men say that the people ought to be taught to use potatoes as a substitute for bread? Paragraphs 108 to 110, brewing beer. This matter has been fully treated of in the two last numbers, but several correspondents wishing to fall upon some means of rendering the practice beneficial to those who are unable to purchase brewing utensils have recommended the lending of them or letting out round a neighbourhood. Another correspondent has therefore pointed out to me an act of parliament, which touches upon this subject, and indeed what of excise laws and custom laws and combination laws and libel laws, a human being in this country scarcely knows what he dares do or what he dares say. What father, for instance, would have imagined that having brewing utensils, which two men carry from house to house as easily as they can a basket, he dared not lend them to his son, living in the next street, or at the next door? Yet such really is the law, for according to the act fifth of the twenty-second and twenty-third of that honest and sincere gentleman Charles the second, there is a penalty of fifty pounds for lending or letting brewing utensils. However, it has this limit that the penalty is confined to cities, corporate towns, and market towns where there is a public brew-house, so that in the first place you may let or lend in any place where there is no public brew-house, and in all towns not corporate or market, and in all villages, hamlets, and scattered places. Another thing is, can a man who has brewed beer at his own house in the country bring that beer into town, to his own house, and for the use of his family there? This has been asked of me. I cannot give a positive answer without reading about seven large volumes in court of taxing laws. The best way would be to try it, and if any penalty pay it by subscription, if that would not come under the law of conspiracy. However, I think there can be no danger here. So monstrous a thing as this can surely not exist. If there be such a law it is daily violated, for nothing is more common than for country gentlemen who have a dislike to die by poison, bringing their home-brewed beer to London. Another correspondent recommends parishes to make their own malt. But surely the landlords mean to get rid of the malt and salt tax. Many dairies, I dare say, pay fifty pounds a year each in salt tax. How, then, are they to contend against Irish butter and Dutch butter and cheese? And as to the malt tax it is a dreadful drain from the land. I have heard of labourers living in un-kent places, making their own malt even now. Nothing is so easy as to make your own malt, if you are permitted. You soak the barley about three days, according to the state of the weather, and then you put it on stones or bricks and keep it turned till the root shoots out, and then to know when to stop and to put it to dry, take up a corn, which you will find nearly transparent, and look through the skin of it. You will see the spear, that is to say the shoot that would come out of the ground, pushing on towards the point of the barley-corn. It starts from the bottom where the root comes out, and it goes on towards the other end, and would, if kept moist, come out at that other end when the root was about an inch long. So that when you have got the root to start, by soaking and turning in heap, the spear is on its way. If you look in through the skin, you will see it, and now observe when the point of the spear has got along as far as the middle of the barley-corn, you should take your barley and dry it. How easy would every family, and especially every farmer, do this, if it were not for the punishment attached to it. The persons in the un-kent places before mentioned dry the malt in their oven. But let us hope that the laborer will soon be able to get malt without exposing himself to punishment as a violator of the law. Paragraphs 111 to 128, keeping cows. As to the use of milk, and of that which proceeds from milk in a family, very little need be said. At a certain age bread and milk are all that a child wants. As a later age they furnish one meal a day for children. Milk is at all seasons good to drink, in the making of puddings, and in making of bread, too, how useful is it? Let any one who has eaten none but baker's bread for a good while, taste bread home-baked, mixed with milk instead of with water, and he will find what the difference is. There is this only to be observed, that in hot weather bread mixed with milk will not keep so long as that mixed with water. It will of course turn sour sooner. Whether the milk of a cow be to be consumed by a cottage family in the shape of milk, or whether it be to be made to yield butter, skim milk, and butter milk, must depend on circumstances. A woman that has no child, or only one, would perhaps find it best to make some butter at any rate. Besides skim milk and bread, the milk being boiled, is quite strong food enough for any children's breakfast, even when they begin to go to work. A fact which I state upon the most ample and satisfactory experience, very seldom having ever had any other sort of breakfast myself till I was more than ten years old, and I was in the fields at work full four years before that. I will here mention that it gave me singular pleasure to see a boy just turned of six, helping his father to reap in Sussex this last summer. He did little, to be sure, but it was something. His father sent him into the ridge at a great distance before him, and when he came up to the place he found a sheath-cut, and those who know what it is to reap know how pleasant it is to find now and then a sheath-cut ready to their hand. It was no small thing to see a boy fit to be trusted with so dangerous a thing as a reap-hook in his hands, at an age when young masters have nursery maids to cut their vitals for them, and to see that they do not fall out of the window, tumble downstairs, or run under carriage-wheels or horses' bellies. Was not this father discharging his duty by this boy much better than he would have been by sending him to a place called a school? The boy is in a school here, and an excellent school, too—the school of useful labour. I must hear a great deal more than I ever have heard to convince me that teaching children to read tends so much to their happiness, their independence of spirit, their manliness of character, as teaching them to reap. The creature that is in want must be a slave, and to be habituated to labour cheerfully is the only means of preventing nineteenth-twentieths of mankind from being in want. I have digressed here, but observations of this sort can in my opinion never be too often repeated, especially at a time when all sorts of mad projects are on foot for what is falsely called educating the people, and when some would do this by a tax that would compel the single man to give part of his earnings to teach the married man's children to read and write. Before I quit the uses to which milk may be put, let me mention that, as mere drink, it is, and less perhaps in case of heavy labour, better in my opinion than any beer, however good. I have drank little else for the last five years at any time of the day—skim milk, I mean. If you have not milk enough to wet up your bread with, for a bushel of flour requires about sixteen to eighteen pints, you make up the quantity with water, of course, or, which is a very good way, with water that has been put boiling hot upon the bran, and then drained off. This takes the goodness out of the bran, to be sure, but really good bread is a thing of so much importance that it always ought to be the very first object in domestic economy. The cases vary so much that it is impossible to lay down rules for the application of the produce of a cow, which rules shall fit all cases. I content myself therefore with what has already been said on the subject, and shall only make an observation on the act of milking, before I come to the chief matter, namely, the getting of the food for the cow. A cow should be milked clean. Not a drop, if it can be avoided, should be left in the udder. It has been proved that the half pint that comes out last has twelve times, I think it is, as much butter in it as the half pint that comes out first. I tried the milk of ten oldenly cows, and, as nearly as I, without being very nice about the matter, could ascertain, I found the difference to be about what I have stated. The udder would seem to be a sort of milk-pan, in which the cream is uppermost, and, of course, comes out last, seeing that the outlet is at the bottom. But, besides this, if you do not milk clean, the cow will give less and less milk, and will become dry much sooner than she ought. The cause of this, I do not know, but experience has long established the fact. In providing food for a cow, we must look first at the sort of cow, seeing that a cow of one sort will certainly require more than twice as much food as a cow of another sort. For a cottage, a cow of the smallest sort common in England is, on every account, the best, and such a cow will not require above seventy or eighty pounds of good moist food in the twenty-four hours. Now, how to raise this food on forty rods of ground is what we want to know. It frequently happens that a labourer has more than forty rods of ground. It more frequently happens that he has some common, some lane, some little outlet or other for a part of the year at least. In such cases he may make a different disposition of his ground, or may do with less than forty rods. I am here, for simplicity's sake, to suppose that he have forty rods of clear, unshaded land, besides what his house and shed stand upon, and that he have nothing further in the way of means to keep his cow. I suppose the forty rods to be clean and unshaded, for I am to suppose that when a man thinks of five quarts of milk a day, on an average, all the year round, he will not suffer his ground to be encumbered by apple-trees that give him only the means of treating his children to fits of the belly-ache, or with currants and gooseberry-bushes, which, though their fruit do very well to amuse, really give nothing worthy of the name of food except the black birds and thrushes. The ground is to be clear of trees, and in the spring we will suppose it to be clean. Then dig it up deeply, or, which is better, trench it, keeping however the tops bit of soil at the top. Lay it in ridges, in April or May, about two feet apart, and made high and sharp. When the weeds appear about three inches high, turn the ridges into the furrows, never moving the ground but in dry weather, and bury all the weeds. Do this as often as the weeds get three inches high, and by the fall you will have really clean ground and not poor ground. There is the ground then ready. About the twenty-sixth of August, but not earlier, prepare a rod of your ground, and put a manure in it, for some you must have, and sow one half of it with early york cabbage seed, and the other half with sugar-loaf cabbage seed, both of the true sort, in little drills at eight inches apart, and the seeds thin in the drill. If the plants come up at two inches apart, and they should be thinned, if thicker, you will have a plenty. As soon as fairly out of the ground hoe the ground nicely, and pretty deeply, and again in a few days. When the plants have six leaves, which will be very soon, dig up, make fine, and manure another rod or two, and prick out the plants four thousand of each in rows at eight inches apart, and three inches in the row. Hoe the ground between them often, and they will grow fast, and be straight and strong. I suppose that these beds for plants take four rods of your ground. Earlier November, or as the weather may serve a little earlier or later, lay some manure, of which I shall say more hereafter, between the ridges in the other thirty-six rods, and turn the ridges over on this manure, and then transplant your plants on the ridges at fifteen inches apart. Here they will stand the winter, and you must see that slugs do not eat them. If any plants fail you have plenty in the bed where you prick them out, for your thirty-six rods will not require more than four thousand plants. If the winter be very hard, and badly for plants, you cannot cover thirty-six rods, but you may the bed where the rest of your plants are. A little litter, or straw, or dead grass, or fern, laid along between the rows and the plants, not to cover the leaves, will preserve them completely. When people complain of all their plants being cut off, they have in fact nothing to complain of but their own extreme carelessness. If I had a gardener who complained of all his plants being cut off, I should cut him off pretty quickly. If those in the thirty-six rods fail, or fail in part, fill up their places later in the winter by plants from the bed. If you find the ground dry at the top during the winter, hoe it, and particularly near the plants, and rout out all slugs and insects. And when march comes and the ground is dry, hoe deep and well, and earth the plants up close to the lower leaves. As soon as the plants begin to grow, dig the ground with a spade, clean and well, and let the spade go as near to the plants as you can without actually displacing the plants. Give them another digging in a month, and if weeds come in the meanwhile, hoe, and let not one live a week. Oh, what a deal of work! Well, but it is for yourself, and besides it is not all to be done in a day, and we shall by and by see what it is altogether. By the first of June, I speak of the south of England, and there is also some difference in seasons and soils, but generally speaking by the first of June you will have turned in cabbages, and soon you will have the early York solid. And by the first of June you may get your cow, one that is about to carve, or that has just carved, and at this time such a cow as you will want will not, thank God, cost above five pounds. I shall speak of the place to keep her in, and of the manure and litter, by and by. At present I can find myself to her mere food. The thirty-six rods, if the cabbages all stood till they got solid, would give her food for two hundred days, at eighty pounds weight per day, which is more than she would eat. But you must use some at first that are not solid, and then some of them will have split before you can use them. But you will have pigs to help off with them, and to gnaw the heads of the stumps. Some of the sugar loaves may have been planted out in the spring, and thus these thirty-six rods will get you along to some time in September. Now mind in March and again in April sew more early Yorks, and get them to be fine stout plants as you did those in the fall. Dig up the ground and manure it, and as fast as you cut cabbages, plant cabbages, and in the same manner and with the same cultivation as before. Your last planting will be about the middle of August with stout plants, and these will serve you into the month of November. Now we have to provide from December to May, inclusive, and that too out of this same piece of ground. In November there must be arrived at perfection three thousand turnip plants. These, without the greens, must weigh on an average five pounds, and this at eighty pounds a day will keep the cow one hundred and eighty-seven days, and there are but one hundred and eighty-two days in these six months. The greens will have helped out the latest cabbages to carry you through November, and perhaps into December, but for these six months you must depend on nothing but the Swedish turnips. And now how are these to be had upon the same ground that bears the cabbages? That we are now going to see. When you plant out your cabbages at the outset, put first a row of early yorks, then a row of sugar loaves, and so on throughout the piece. Of course as you are to use the early yorks first you will cut every other row, and the early yorks that you are to plant in summer will go into the intervals. By and by the sugar loaves are cut away, and in their place will come Swedish turnips, you digging and manuring the ground as in the case of the cabbages. And at last you will find about sixteen rods where you will have found it too late and unnecessary besides to plant any second crop of cabbages. Here the Swedish turnips will stand in rows at two feet apart and always a foot apart in the row, and thus you will have three thousand turnips. And if these do not weigh five pounds each on an average, the fault must be in the seed or in the management. The Swedish turnips are raised in this manner. You will bear in mind the four rods of ground in which you have sowed and pricked out your cabbage plants. The plants that will be left there will in April serve you for greens, if you ever eat any, though bread and bacon are very good without greens, and rather better than with. At any rate the pig, which has strong powers of digestion, will consume this herbage. In a part of these four rods you will, in March and April, as before directed, have sown and raised your early yorks for the summer planting. Now in the last week of May prepare a quarter of a rod of this ground and sow it precisely as directed for the cabbage seed with Swedish turnip seed, and sow a quarter of a rod every three days till you have sowed two rods. If the fly appear cover the rods over in the daytime with cabbage leaves, and take the leaves off at night, hoe well between the plants, and when they are safe from the fly, thin them to four inches apart in the row. The two rods will give you nearly five thousand plants, which is two thousand more than you will want. From this bed you draw your plants to transplant in the ground where the cabbages have stood, as before directed. You should transplant none much before the middle of July, and not much later than the middle of August. Between the two rods, once you take your turnip plants, you may leave plants to come to perfection at two feet distance each way, and this will give you over and above eight hundred and forty pounds weight of turnips. For the other two rods will be ground enough for you to sow your cabbage plants in at the end of August, as directed for last year. I should now proceed to speak of the manner of harvesting, preserving and using the crops, of the manner of feeding the cow, of the shed for her, of the managing of the manure, and several other less important things. But these, for want of room here, must be reserved for the beginning of my next number. After therefore observing that the turnip plants must be transplanted in the same way that cabbage plants are, and that both ought to be transplanted in dry weather, and in ground just fresh-digged, I shall close this number with the notice of two points which I am most anxious to impress upon the mind of every reader. The first is whether these crops give an ill taste to milk and butter. It is very certain that the taste and smell of certain sorts of cattle food will do this, for in some parts of America, with a wild garlic of which the cows are very fond, and which, like other bulbous-rooted plants, springs before the grass, not only the milk and butter have a strong taste of garlic, but even the veal when the calves suck milk from such sources. None can be more common expressions than, in Philadelphia market, are those of garlicky butter and garlicky veal. I have distinctly tasted the whisky in milk of cows fed upon distillers' wash. It is also certain that if the cow eat putrid leaves of cabbages and turnips the butter will be offensive, and the white turnip, which is at best but a poor thing, and often half putrid, makes miserable butter. The large cattle cabbage, which, when loved hard, has a strong and even an offensive smell, will give a bad taste and smell to milk and butter whether there be putrid leaves or not. If you boil one of these rank cabbages the water is extremely offensive to the smell. But I state upon positive and recent experience that early york and sugar-loaf cabbages will yield as sweet milk and butter as any food that can be given to a cow. During this last summer I have, with the exception about to be noticed, kept from the first of May to the twenty-second of October five cows upon the grass of two acres and a quarter of ground, the grass being generally cut up for them and given to them in the stall. I had in the spring five thousand cabbage plants intended for my pigs eleven in number. But the pigs could not eat half their allowance, though they were not very small when they began upon it. We were compelled to resort to the aid of the cows, and in order to see the effect on the milk and butter we did not mix the food, but gave the cows two distinct spells at the cabbages, each spell about ten days in duration. The cabbages were cut off the stump with little or no care about dead leaves, and sweeter, finer butter, butter of a finer colour than these cabbages made, never was made in this world. I never had better from cows feeding in the sweetest pasture. Now as to Swedish turnips they do give a little taste, especially if boiling of the milk-pans be neglected, and if the greatest care be not taken about all the dairy tackle. Yet we have for months together had the butter so fine from Swedish turnips that nobody could well distinguish it from grass-butter. But to secure this there must be no sluttishness. Churn, pans, pail, shelves, wall, floor, and all about the dairy must be clean, and above all things the pans must be boiled. However, after all, it is not here a case of delicacy of smell so refined as to faint at anything that meets it except the sting of perfumes. If the butter do taste a little of the Swedish turnip it will do very well where there is plenty of that sweet source which early rising and bodily labour are ever sure to bring. The other point about which I am still more anxious is the seed, for if the seed be not sound and especially if it be not true to its kind all your labour is in vain. It is best if you can do it to get your seed from some friend or someone that you know and can trust. If you save seed observe all the precautions mentioned in my book on gardening. This very year I have some Swedish turnips, so called, about seven thousand in number, and should, if my seed had been true, have had about twenty tonnes weight, instead of which I have about three. Indeed they are not Swedish turnips, but a sort of mixture between that plant and I am sure the seedsman did not willfully deceive me, he was deceived himself. The truth is that seedsmen are compelled to buy their seeds of this plant, farmers save it, and they do but too often pay very little attention to the manner of doing it. The best way is to get a dozen of fine turnip plants perfect in all respects and plant them in a situation where the smell of the blossoms of nothing of the cabbage or rape or turnip or even charlotte kind can reach them. The seed will keep perfectly good for four years. End of number four. Number five of Cottage Economy by William Cobbett. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Philippa. Paragraphs 129 to 138 keeping cows continued. I have now in the conclusion of this article to speak of the manner of harvesting and preserving the Swedes, of the place to keep the cow in, of the manure for the land, and of the quantity of labour that the cultivation of the land and the harvesting of the crop will require. Harvesting and preserving the Swedes. When they are ready to take up, the tops must be cut off, if not cut off before, and also the roots, but neither tops nor roots should be cut off very close. You will have room for ten bushels of the bulbs in the house or shed. Put the rest into ten bushel heaps. Make the heap upon the ground in a round form and let it rise up to a point. Lay over it a little litter, straw or dead grass, about three inches thick, and then earth upon that, about six inches thick. Then cut a thin round green turf, about 18 inches over, and put it upon the crown of the heap to prevent the earth from being washed off. Thus these heaps will remain till wanted for use. When given to the cow, it will be best to wash the Swedes and cut each into two or three pieces with their spade or some other tool. You can take in ten bushels at a time. If you find them sprouting in the spring, open the remaining heaps and expose them to the sun and wind, and cover them again slightly with straw or litter of some sort. Footnote. Be sure now, before you go any further, to go to the end of the book, and there read about mangle-wurzel. Be sure to do this, and there read also about cobbitt's corn. Be sure to do this before you go any further. End of footnote. As to the place to keep the cow in, much will depend upon situations and circumstances. I am always supposing that the cottage is a real cottage, and not a house in a town or village street. Though wherever there is the quarter of an acre of ground, the cow may be kept. Let me, however, suppose that which will generally happen, namely that the cottage stands by the side of a road or lane, and amongst fields and woods, if not on the side of a common. To pretend to tell a country labourer how to build a shed for a cow, how to stick it up against the end of his house, or to make it an independent direction, or to dwell on the materials where poles, rods, wattles, rushes, furs, heaths and cooperchips are all to be gotten by him for nothing or next to nothing would be useless, because a man who thus situated can be at any loss for a shed for his cow is not only unfit to keep a cow, but unfit to keep a cat. The warmer the shed, the better it is. The floor should slope, but not too much. There are stones of some sort or other everywhere, and about six wheel-barrowfuls will pave the shed, a thing to be by no means neglected. A broad trough, or box, fixed up at the head of the cow, is the thing to give her food in, and she should be fed three times a day at least, always at daylight and at sunset. It is not absolutely necessary that a cow ever quit her shed except just at carving-time or when taken to the bull. In the former case the time is nine times out of ten known to within forty-eight hours. Any enclosed field or place will do for her during a day or two, and for such purpose, if there be not room at home, no man will refuse place for her in a fallow field. It will, however, be good where there is no common to turn her out upon to have her led by a string two or three times a week, which may be done by a child only five years old, to graze or pick along the sides of roads and lanes. Where there is a common she will of course be turned out in the daytime except in very wet or severe weather, and in a case like this a smaller quantity of ground will suffice for the keeping of her. According to the present practice a miserable tallot of bad hay is in such cases the winter provision for the cow. It can scarcely be called food, and the consequence is the cow is both dry and lousy nearly half the year, instead of being dry only about fifteen days before carving, and being sleek and lusty at the end of the winter, to which a warm lodging greatly contributes. You observe, if you keep a cow any time between September and June out in a field or yard, to endure the chances of the weather, she will not, though she have food precisely the same in quantity and quality, yield above two-thirds as much as if she were lodged in-house, and in wet weather she will not yield half so much. It is not so much the cold as the wet that is injurious to all our stock in England. At the beginning this must be provided by collections made on the road, by the results of the residents in a cottage. Let any man clean out every place about his dwelling, rake and scrape and sweep all into a heap, and he will find that he has a great deal. Earth of almost any sort that has long lain on the surface, and has been trodden on, is a species of manure. Every act that tends to neatness round a dwelling tends to the creating of a mass of manure, and I have very seldom seen a cottage with the platt of ground of a quarter of an acre belonging to it, round about which I could not have collected a very large heap of manure. Every thing of animal or vegetable substance that comes into a house must go out of it again in one shape or another. The very emptying of vessels of various kinds on a heap of common earth makes it a heap of the best of manure. Thus goes on the work of reproduction, and thus is verified the words of the scripture. Flesh is grass, and there is nothing new under the sun. Thus far as to the outset. When you have got the cow, there is no more care about manure, for, and especially if you have a pig also, you must have enough annually for an acre of ground, and let it be observed that after a time it will be unnecessary and would be injurious to manure for every crop, for that would produce more stalk and greens and substantial part, as it is well known that wheat plants standing in ground too full of manure will yield very thick and long straws but grains of little or no substance. You ought to depend more on the spade and the hoe than on the dung-heap. Nevertheless the greatest care should be taken to preserve the manure, because you will want straw unless you be by the side of a common which gives you rushes, grassy furs or fern, and to get straw you must give a part of your dung from the cow-stall and pigsty. The best way to preserve manure is to have a pit of sufficient dimensions close behind the cow shed and pigsty for the run from these to go into, and from which all runs of rainwater should be kept. Into this pit would go the emptying of the shed and of the stye, and the produce of all sweepings and cleanings round the house, and thus a large mass of manure would soon grow together, much too large a quantity for a quarter of an acre of ground. One good load of wheat or rye straw is all that you would want for the winter and half of one for the summer, and you would have more than enough dung to exchange against this straw. Now as to the quantity of labour that the cultivation of the land will demand in a year, we will suppose the whole to have five complete diggings and say nothing about the little matters of sowing and planting and hoeing and harvesting, all of which are a mere trifle. We are supposing the owner to be an able labouring man, and such a man will dig twelve rods of ground in a day. Here are two hundred rods to be digged, and here are little less than seventeen days of work at twelve hours in the day, or two hundred hours work, to be done in the course of the long days of spring and summer, when it is light long before six in the morning and long after six at night. What is it then? Is it not better than time spent in the ale-house, or in creeping about after a miserable hair? Frequently, and most frequently, there will be a boy if not too big enough to help. And, I only give this as a hint, I saw on the seventh of November last, 1882, a very pretty woman in the village of Hannington in Wiltshire digging a piece of ground and planting it with early cabbages, which she did as handily and as neatly as any gardener that ever I saw. The ground was wet, and therefore to avoid treading the digged ground in that state, she had a line extended, and put in the rows as she advanced in her digging, standing in the trench while she performed the act of planting, which she did with great nimbleness and precision. Nothing could be more skillfully or beautifully done. Her clothes were neat, clean, and tight about her. She had turned her handkerchief down from her neck, which, with the glow that the work had brought into her cheeks, formed an object which I do not say would have made me actually stop my shays, had it not been for the occupation in which she was engaged, but all taken together, the temptation was too strong to be resisted. But there is the Sunday, and I know of no law, human or divine, that forbids a laboring man to dig or plant his garden on Sunday, if the good of his family demand it, and if he cannot without injury to that family, find another time to do it in. Shepherds, carters, pig-feeders, drovers, coachmen, cooks, footmen, printers, and numerous others work on the Sundays. Theirs are deemed by the law works of necessity. Harvesting and hay-making are allowed to be carried on on the Sunday in certain cases, when they are always carried on by provident farmers. And I should be glad to know the case which is more a case of necessity than that now under our view. In fact the laboring people do work on the Sunday morning in particular, all over the country at something or other, or they are engaged in pursuits a good deal less religious than that of digging and planting, so that, as to the two hundred hours, they are easily found, without the loss of any of the time required for constant daily labour. And what a produce is that of a cow? I suppose only an average of five quarts of milk a day. If made into butter, it will be equal every week to two days of the man's wages, besides the value of the skim milk, and this can hardly be of less value than another day's wages. What a thing, then, is this cow, if she earn half as much as the man? I am greatly underrating her produce, but I wish to put all the advantages at the lowest. To be sure there is work for the wife or daughter, to milk and make butter. But the former is done at the two ends of the day, and the latter only about once in the week. And whatever these may subtract from the labours of the field, which all countrywomen ought to be engaged in whenever they conveniently can, whatever the cares created by the cow may subtract from these, is amply compensated for by the education that these cares will give to the children. They will all learn to milk and the girls to make butter. To me the following has happened within the last year. A young man, in the country, had agreed to be my servant, but it was found that he could not milk, and the bargain was set aside. About a month afterwards a young man, who said he was a farmer's son, and who came from Herefordshire, offered himself to me at Kensington. Can you milk? He could not, but would learn. I, but in the learning, he might dry up my cows. What a shame to the parents of these young men! Both of them were in want of employment. The latter had come more than a hundred miles in search of work, and here he was left to hunger still and to be exposed to all sorts of ills, because he could not milk. End of footnote. And, which is a thing of the very first importance, they will all learn from their infancy to set a just value upon dumb animals, and will grow up in the habit of treating them with gentleness and feeding them with care. To those who have not been brought up in the midst of rural affairs, it is hardly possible to give an adequate idea of the importance of this part of education. I should be very loath to entrust the care of my horses, cattle, sheep, or pigs, to any one whose father never had a cow or pig of his own. It is a general complaint that servants, and especially farm servants, are not so good as they used to be. How should they? They were formerly the sons and daughters of small farmers. They are now the progeny of miserable propertyless labourers. They have never seen an animal in which they had any interest. They are careless by habit. This monstrous evil has arisen from causes which I have a thousand times described, and which causes must now be speedily removed, or they will produce a dissolution of society, and give us a beginning afresh. The circumstance is very so much that it is impossible to lay down precise rules suited to all cases. The cottage may be on the side of a forest or common. It may be on the side of a lane or of a great road, distant from town or village. It may be on the skirts of one of these latter. And then again the family may be few or great in number, the children small or big. According to all which circumstances the extent and application of the cow food, and also the application of the produce, will naturally be regulated. Under some circumstances half the above crop may be enough, especially where good commons are at hand. Sometimes it may be the best way to sell the calf as soon as carved at others to fat it, and at others if you cannot sell it, which sometimes happens, to knock it on the head as soon as carved. For where there is a family of small children, the price of a calf of two months old cannot be equal to the half of the value of the two months milk. It is pure weakness to call it a pity. It is a much greater pity to see hungry children crying for the milk that a calf is sucking to no useful purpose, and as to the cow and the calf, the one must lose her young and the other its life after all, and the respite only makes an addition to the sufferings of both. As to the pretended unwholesomeness of milk in certain cases, as to its not being adapted to some constitutions, I do not believe one word of the matter. When we talk of the fruits, indeed, which were formerly the chief food of a great part of mankind, we should recollect that those fruits grew in countries that had a sun to ripen the fruits, and to put nutritious matter into them. But as to milk, England yields to no country upon the face of the earth. Neat cattle will touch nothing that is not wholesome in its nature, nothing that is not wholly inoxious. Out of a pale that has ever had grease in it they will not drink a drop, though they be raging with thirst. Their very breath is fragrance. And how then is it possible that unwholesomeness should distill from the udder of a cow? The milk varies indeed in its quality and taste according to the variations in the nature of the food, but no food will a cow touch that is any way hostile to health. Feed young puppies upon milk from the cow, and they will never die with that ravaging disease called the distemper. In short, to suppose that milk contains anything essentially unwholesome is monstrous. When indeed the appetite becomes vitiated, when the organs have been long accustomed to food of a more stimulating nature, when it has been resolved to eat ragus at dinner, and drink wine and swallow a devil and a glass of strong grog at night, then milk for breakfast may be heavy and disgusting, and the feeder may stand in need of tea or laldinum, which differ only as to degrees of strength. But, and I speak from the most ample experience, milk is not heavy, and much less is it unwholesome, when he who uses it rises early never swallows strong drink, and never stuffs himself with flesh of any kind. Many and many a day I scarcely taste of meat, and then chiefly at breakfast, and that too at an early hour. Milk is the natural food of young people. If it be too rich skim it again and again till it be not too rich, this is an evil easily cured. If you have now to begin with the family of children they may not like it at first, but persevere, and the parent who does not do this having the means in his hands shamefully neglects his duty. A son who prefers a devil and a glass of grog to a hunch of bread and a bowl of cold milk I regard as a pest, and for this pest the father has to thank himself. Before I dismiss this article let me offer an observation or two to those persons who live in the vicinity of towns, or in towns, and who though they have large gardens have no land to keep a cow, a circumstance which they exceedingly regret. I have, I dare say, witnessed this case at least a thousand times. Now how much garden ground does it require to supply even a large family with garden vegetables? The market gardeners round the metropolis of this when-headed country, round this when of all when's—editor's footnote, London. Round this prodigious and monstrous collection of human beings, these market gardeners have about three hundred thousand families to supply with vegetables, and these they supply well too, and with summer fruits into the bargain. Now, if it demanded ten rods to a family, the whole would demand, all but a fraction, nineteen thousand acres of garden ground. We have only to cast our eyes over what there is to know that there is not a fourth of that quantity. A square mile contains, leaving out parts of a hundred, seven hundred acres of land, and nineteen thousand acres occupy more than twenty-two square miles. Are there twenty-two square miles covered with the when's market gardens? The very question is absurd. The whole of the market gardens from Brompton to Hammersmith extending to Battersea Rise on the one side and to the Bayswater Road on the other side, and leaving out roads, lanes, nurseries, pastures, cornfields, and pleasure grounds, do not, in my opinion, cover one square mile. To the north and south of the when there is very little in the way of market garden, and if on both sides of the Thames to the eastward of the when there be three square miles actually covered with market gardens, that is the full extent. How then could the when be supplied if it required ten rods to each family? To be sure, potatoes, carrots, and turnips, and especially the first of these, are brought for the use of the when from a great distance in many cases. But so they are for the use of the persons I am speaking of, for a gentleman thinks no more of raising a large quantity of these things in his garden than he thinks of raising wheat there. How is it then that it requires half an acre or eighty rods in a private garden to supply a family, while these market gardeners supply all these families and so amply too from ten or more likely five rods of ground to a family? I have shown in the last number that nearly fifteen tons of vegetables can be raised in a year upon forty rods of ground, that is to say ten loads for a wagon and four good horses. And is not a fourth or even an eighth part of this weight sufficient to go down the throats of a family in a year? Nay, allow that only a tonne goes to a family in a year. It is more than six pound way to day. And what sort of a family must that be that really swallows six pounds way to day? And this a market gardener will raise for them upon less than three rods of ground, for he will raise in the course of the year even more than fifteen tons upon forty rods of ground. What is it then that they do with the eighty rods of ground in a private garden? Why, in the first place, they have one crop where they ought to have three. Then they do not have till the ground. Then they grow things that are not wanted. Plant cabbages and other things, let them stand till they be good for nothing, and then wheel them to the rubbish heap. Raise as many radishes, lettuces, and as much endive, and as many kidney beans, as would serve for ten families, and finally throw nine-tenths of them away. I once saw not less than three rods of ground in a garden of this sort, with lettuces all bearing seed, seed enough for half a county. They cut a cabbage here and a cabbage there, and so let the whole of the piece of ground remain undug till the last cabbage be cut. But after all the produce, even in this way, is so great that it could never be gotten rid of if the main part were not thrown away. The rubbish heap always receives four-fifths even of the eatable part of the produce. It is not thus that the market gardeners proceed. Their rubbish heap consists of little besides mere cabbage stumps. No sooner is one crop on the ground than they settle in their minds what is to follow it. They clear as they go in taking off a crop, and as they clear they dig and plant. The ground is never without seed in it or plants on it, and thus in the course of the year they raise a prodigious bulk of vegetables from eighty rods of ground. Such vigilance and industry are not to be expected in a servant, for it is foolish to expect that a man will exert himself for another as much as he will for himself. But if I was situated as one of the persons is that I have spoken of in paragraph 137, that is to say, if I had a garden of eighty rods, or even of sixty rods of ground, I would out of that garden draw a sufficiency of vegetables for my family, and would make it yield enough for a cow besides. I should go a short way to work with my gardener. I should put cottage economy into his hands, and tell him that if he could furnish me with vegetables and my cow with food he was my man, and that if he could not I must get one that could and would. I am not for making a man toil like a slave, but what would become of the world if a well-fed, healthy man could exhaust himself in tilling and cropping and clearing half an acre of ground? I have known many men dig thirty rods of garden ground in a day. I have before I was fourteen digged twenty rods in a day for more than ten days successively, and I have heard and believed the fact of a man at Portsea who digged forty rods in one single day between daylight and dark, so that it is no slavish toil that I am here recommending. Paragraphs 139 to 142 keeping pigs. Next after the cow comes the pig, and in many cases where a cow cannot be kept, a pig or pigs may be kept. But these are animals not to be ventured on without due consideration as to the means of feeding them, for a starved pig is a great deal worse than none at all. You cannot make bacon as you can milk merely out of the garden. There must be something more. A couple of flitches of bacon are worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts. The sight of them upon the rack tends more to keep a man from poaching and stealing than whole volumes of penal statutes, though assisted by the terrors of the hulks and the gibbet. They are great softeners of the temper and promoters of domestic harmony. They are a great blessing, but they are not to be had from herbage or roots of any kind, and therefore before a pig be attempted the means ought to be considered. Breeding sows are great favourites with cottages in general, but I have seldom known them to answer their purpose. Where there is an outlet the sow will indeed keep herself by grazing in summer with a little wash to help her out, and when her pigs come they are many in number, but they are a heavy expense. The sow must live as well as a fatting hog, or the pigs will be good for little. It is a great mistake, too, to suppose that the condition of the sow previous to pinging is of no consequence, and indeed some suppose that she ought to be rather bare of flesh at the pinging time. Never was a greater mistake, for if she be in this state she presently becomes a mere rack of bones, and then, do what you will, the pigs will be poor things. However fat she may be before she farrow the pigs will make her lean in a week. All her fat goes away in her milk, and unless the pigs have a store to draw upon they pull her down directly, and by the time they are three weeks old they are starving for want, and then they never come to good. Now a cottage's sow cannot without great expense be kept in a way to enable her to meet the demands of her farrow. She may look pretty well, but the flesh she has upon her is not of the same nature as that which the farmyard's sow carries about her. It is the result of grass, and of poor grass, too, or other weak food, and not made partly out of corn and whey and strong wash, as in the case of the farmer's sow. No food short of that of a fatting hog will enable her to keep her pigs alive, and this she must have for ten weeks, and that at a great expense. Then comes the operation upon the principal of Pars and Malthus in order to check population, and there is some risk here, though not very great, but there is the weaning, and who that knows anything about the matter will think lightly of the weaning of a farrow of pigs. By having nice food given them they seem for a few days not to miss their mother, but their appearance soon shows the want of her. Nothing but the very best food, and that given in the most judicious manner, will keep them up to anything like good condition, and indeed there is nothing short of milk that will affect the thing well. How should it be otherwise? The very richest cow's milk is poor compared with that of the sow, and be taken from this, and put upon food one ingredient of which is water, is quite sufficient to reduce the poor little things to bare bones and staring hair, a state to which cottages' pigs very soon come in general, and at last he frequently drives them to market and sells them for less than the cost of the food which they and the sow have devoured since they were farrowed. It was doubtless pigs of this description that were sold the other day at Newbury Market, for fifteen pence apiece, and which were, I dare say, dear even as a gift. To get such a pig to begin to grow will require three months, and with good feeding too in winter time. To be sure it does come to be a hog at last, but do what you can, it is a dear hog. The cottager, then, can hold no competition with the farmer in the breeding of pigs, to do which with advantage there must be milk, and milk too that can be advantageously applied to no other use. The cottager's pig must be bought ready-weened to his hand, and indeed at four months old, at which age if he be in good condition he will eat anything that an old hog will eat. He will graze, eat cabbage leaves, and almost the stumps. Swedish turnip tops, or roots, and such things with a little wash will keep him along in very good growing order. I have now to speak of the time of purchasing, the manner of keeping, of fatting, killing, and curing, but these I must reserve till my next number. End of number five.