The scientific dinner consists of haricot beans, or lentil soup, or oatmeal porridge, or vegetable pot-bouilli; say twopence a quart. They can get all the proteids out of that, and lift the requisite foot-tons.
No wasteful bread and butter, no scandalous cheese, no abominable beef bone, no wretched rabbit, no prodigal potatoes, above all, No immoral ale!
There, Mrs. Iden.
Go to the famous Henry Ward Beecher, that shining light and apostle, Mrs. Iden, and read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest what he says:—
"A man who cannot live on bread is not fit to live. A family may live, laugh, love and be happy that eats bread in the morning with good water, and water and good bread at noon, and water and bread at night."
Does that sound like an echo of the voice that ceased on the Cross?
Guilty Mrs Iden, ignorant farmer's wife; hide your beef and ale, your rabbit and potatoes.
To duchesses and earlesses, and plump City ladies riding in carriages, and all such who eat and drink five times a day, and have six or eight courses at dinner, doubtless once now and then a meal of vegetable pot-bouilli, or oatmeal porridge, or lentil soup (three halfpence a pound lentils), or haricot beans and water would prove a scientifically wholesome thing.
But to those who exist all the week on hunches of dry bread, and not much of that, oatmeal porridge doesn't seem to come as a luxury. They would like something juicy; good rumpsteak now, with plenty of rich gravy, broad slices from legs of mutton, and foaming mugs of ale. They need something to put fresh blood and warmth into them.
You sometimes hear people remark: "How strange it is—the poor never buy oatmeal, or lentils!"