On economical grounds, however, the difference is enormous. If all Englishmen were vegetarians and fish-eaters, the whole aspect of the country would be changed. It would be a land of gardens and orchards, instead of gradually reverting to prairie grazing-ground as at present. The unemployed miserables of our great towns, the inhabitants of our union workhouses, and all our rogues and vagabonds, would find ample and suitable employment in agriculture. Every acre of land would require three or four times as much labour as at present, and feed five or six times as many people.
No sentimental exaggeration is demanded for the recommendation of such a reform as this.
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
MALTED FOOD.
A few years ago the ‘farmers’ friends’ were very sanguine on the subject of using malt as cattle food. At agricultural meetings throughout the country the iniquitous malt-tax was eloquently denounced because it stood in the way of this great fodder reform. Then the malt-tax was repealed, and forthwith the subject fell out of hearing. Why was this?
The idea of malt feeding was theoretically sound. By the malting of barley or other grain its diastase is made to act upon its insoluble starch, and to convert this more or less completely into soluble dextrin, a change which is absolutely necessary as a part of the business of digestion. Therefore, if you feed cattle on malted grain instead of raw grain, you supply them with a food so prepared that a part of the business of digestion is already done for them, and their nutrition is thereby advanced.
From what I am able to learn, the reason why this hopeful theory has not been carried out is simply that it does not ‘pay.’ The advantage in fattening the cattle is not sufficient to remunerate the farmers for the extra cost of the malted food.
This may be the case with oxen, but it does not follow that it should be the same with human beings. Cattle feed on grass, mangold-wurzels, &c., in their raw state, but we cannot; and, as I have already shown, we are not graminivorous in the manner they are; we cannot digest raw wheat, barley, oats, or maize.
We cannot do this because we are not supplied with such effective natural grinding apparatus as they have in their mouths, and, further, because we have a much smaller supply of saliva and a shorter alimentary canal.