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flesh have taken on him, while his easy neighbour, who is ten times as amenable to the same charges, goes on sinning at large without disturbing his own conscience or the rest of the world about the matter. The raving there has been among us of late about narcotics and stimulants has, in fact, confused our vision and our faculties of discrimination. In their rage against the working man for offending them with the smell of his alcoholic compound and his bad tobacco, the respectables will not fairly measure his failings with those of the rest of mankind. But if we take averages, I am disposed to question whether he is much worse than his neighbours, and especially whether the average German is so much above him as many of our own people maintain him to be.

On the contrary, looking upon our working population, head-workers as well as hand-workers, as the stamina of the country, and taking them as they are with all their defects, I see them elevating our country to an amount of material wealth and greatness far beyond the possible attainments of any other portion of the world. Be our defects what they may, other countries have graver. In Germany especially, I find four heavy weightscall them domestic, social, or by any other name you like-which press down the population, and while tolerated as they are, will ever prevent it from achieving any high position either of greatness or of goodness. These weights are1. Excess in eating.

2. Excess in beer-drinking. 3. Excess in smoking. 4. Excess in the inhaling of foul air.

As to the first, there is no doubt a point up to which it is good both for his body and his mind that man should feed. There are instances only too abundant of degeneration caused by insufficiency of food. But there is mischief also from the habitual consumption of an excess over the quantity suited for health

ful nourishment. This is one of the chief elements of mischief in those affairs where historians tell us of hardy and temperate soldiers enervated by the indolent and luxurious habits of the people they have invaded-as in many instances, from Hannibal's army in Italy downwards. Their poverty, but not their will, consents in the general case of communities underfeeding themselves; where there are the means, the defect is apt to be on the other side. Nor do the fasting ordinances of the Church of Rome do much to avert the evil. Setting aside a portion of Ireland, Brittany, and some parts of Scandinavia, where there is extreme poverty-keeping in view only the portions of Europe where the people are well off, and adjust the scale of their living more by choice and taste than from necessity-I have no doubt that the people of Scotland are the most frugal feeders in Europe; and if we look for results, among what people shall we find a better development, whether of brain or muscle?

We have been accustomed in the North to speak of the Englishman as a great eater, but in comparison with the German he is naught, and in a general estimate of the gluttonous propensities and capacities. of European nations, I think it likely that he would hold a moderate place. He is apt to be fussy and talkative as to his eating, and to be loudly confessorial and deprecatory about it, as about all his other defects. Accustomed to being twitted by his northern neighbour on this head, he feels a diffidence about taking note of brother Herman's wonderful performances at table; but a Scotsman feels himself free to record his amazement that the human frame should be trained to the accomplishment of such achievements in gluttony.

Take an average man of business in London or Liverpool. At ten o'clock he is delivered at the scene of his labours, say in the public service or in his own. From that

time to six o'clock he has been incessantly occupied with affairssome of them complex and difficult -some of them mere matters of easy routine. He has been able to snatch five minutes for luncheon, and that has sufficed. Meanwhile Herman, besides absorbing a gallon, or perhaps two, of beer, and exhaling half a pound of tobacco, has consumed no end of soup, sodden beef, roast veal, cutlets, ham, poultry, prawns, fermented cabbage, potatosalad, asparagus, stewed prunes, apple-tart, and every other kind of eatable he could get at. He has eaten out from one to two hours of the mid-day in which the Englishman has been at his hardest work. And if we follow our countryman home from his business, much as we hear of English luxury and high living, we shall probably find that he has made his dinner on a chop and a potato or two. In great houses there are several courses, more as matter of state than because the partakers indulge in long and varied meals. With those whose household establishment is not on a pompous model, but who can easily afford themselves luxuries, I am disposed to think that in England courses more than two are the exception rather than the rule. There are, no doubt, here and there full feeders and foul feeders; but they are the exception, and rather under discountenance, even should they only reach the ordinary average of gluttony which one sees every day in the German gasthauses.

By the way, I have an idea that travellers in Germany have been inclined to be charitable to German gluttony, on account of the convenience they have felt from it. Where food is thrown everywhere broadcast, the traveller, who may be ignorant of the language and the customs of the people he is among, gets some portions of it, and is tolerant, or perhaps laudatory, to the customs which have thrown it in his way. I remember when railways were in their infancy in

Germany how difficult it was to obtain a morsel of food in the midst of the journey. The correction of this deficiency, however, was a feat to which the national genius was quite equal, and it was speedily remedied. The feedingplaces on the German lines are, in better etymology than either ours or the French, called Restaurations. As an estimate or guess, which may be taken at its own value, I would say that on any ordinary hundred miles of German railway the eating and drinking facilities are five times those offered on an English line. Here and there is an immense buffet, where all the elements of an abundant and varied meal exist, and ample time is given for their consumption. Then there are numerous stoppages for ten minutes or so, where there is a counter well filled with slices of ham and cold veal, sausages, fruit, and liquors of all kinds. When the stoppages are short, men and women are in prompt attendance with sandwiches and glasses of beer; and I have noted it as an exception to the slovenly lazy way in which all business is transacted in Germany, that these ministers to the need or greed of the wayfarer are prompt, active, and remarkably intelligent; the exigency of their duty, which is to provide that their fellow-countrymen shall not be subject to the horror of remaining one half-hour without food and drink, having awakened within them a promptitude and efficiency which the less momentous functions of the rest of their countrymen have been insufficient to stimulate.

It is wonderful to contemplate the laborious accuracy with which every demand for needful sustentation is met by the necessary supply. What a contrast with wanderings in Kerry, or even in the Highlands of Scotland! There is no going to an eminent waterfall-to a mountain-pass-to a distingushed scene of any kind-without finding an abundantly stocked tavern spread

ing its hospitable board for you. Nay, if you take to one of those mountains which have an established repute in German scenery, you shall find a comfortable tavern on the top. The castle of the Wartburg, celebrated as Luther's hidingplace, is not half-an-hour's walk from Eisenach, full of taverns, and the railway station with an abundant restauration; yet at the great gate your eye is caught by an inscription informing you where the nearest Gasthaus is, so important is it to the German mind to provide that no son of Fatherland shall run the risk of being half-an-hour without eating and drinking, and how little is it supposed that the scenery or the historical and ecclesiastical associations of the place can compensate for so long a suspension of the great functions of existence.

With us even the professed epicure or high liver-a person by no means treated with social deference-exercises a certain amount of restraint. He is generally a late diner, reserving his powers for the great occasion. He has traditions of the fastings and trainings which people with his propensities will endure for the purpose of bringing a sufficient appetite to bear upon a sumptuous meal. We are much laughed at for the solemnity with which we invest great dinners. If we want to celebrate a success or a calamity; if we have to inaugurate the majority of an illustrious person, or proclaim the distress of the manufacturing districts, or the failure of the potato crop, the ceremony must assume the aspect of a great feast. But even in this there is a testimony to abstinence or moderation, at all events as the rule of life. The German cannot come out in the same manner. Every day and all day long he eats as much rich food as he can, and therefore to him a special feast is a special practical absurdity.

I am aware that in the midst of the wild outcry against stimulants and narcotics, it will be considered

a sort of blasphemy to hint that any evil can come of eating, since it is a solace largely indulged in by many of the professors of abstinence. I admit that turtle sausage and roast-pig will not rouse a man to knock down a policeman or stab his wife; but neither will muchabused tobacco, for that matter. For influence, however, on the general condition, I am prepared to hold that there is more of health and life destroyed by over-eating than by stimulants and narcotics. Even in our own country one meets with too many members of the comfortable classes whose constitutions are palpably damaged by good living, and the mark of the internal enemy is visible in the countenance of the whole German family. I remember once imparting a terrible shock to the nerves of a lady belonging to the exceedingly comfortable classes. She had been denouncing that filthy and abominable practice of smoking, and boasted that she had just got the parent of a large family dismissed from his employment because she had caught him indulging in a furtive pipe. I asked her if she had ever herself committed the act of eating turbot with lobster sauce. The imputation was not to be denied, since the empty platter which had contained that attractive but pernicious mixture was just giving place to another laden with well-seasoned haunch; nor, to do her justice, did she seem desirous to evade any conclusions that might be drawn from such an act; when I amazed her by saying that, according to my experience, she might indulge herself with a cigar or a pipe of latakia with much less prejudice to the digestive functions.

But while naturally enough indisposed to quarrel with Herman about his good table, it surprises one that those who rave so against drinking in this country should never have a word to throw at him,nay, should sometimes adduce him as an example to be followed. What is set up as the master-vice among

ourselves is in him a sort of amiable weakness. He is like the husband who was pronounced "a good kind of a drunken body, with no harm in him." "He does not take raw spirits like our wretched working classes," you say; but even that is not strictly true. The Schnaps is a considerable institution in Germany, and if you are an early riser, you will often see a glass of brandtwine, or kirschen-wasser, or bitters taken, to fortify the stomach for the heavy beer-drinking of the day. But let us look at fermented liquors alone. It will shock no German to impute to him the consumption of a couple of bottles of wine in any given day-not though you should make it out to be three or four. Now the sages in chemistry tell us that the mildest wine made has 8 per cent of alcohol in it-that without that it cannot be wine at all. Strong ports and sherries have 24 or 25 per cent. Take the average German vintage at half of this-12 per cent.

Well, in proof spirit, which is a good deal above the average of the gin - palace, the amount of alcohol is 50 per cent. It follows that in a couple of bottles of this very harmless stuff there is as much spirit as in half a bottle of good gin or brandy. Then we are told that the strength of the strongest malt liquors just comes up to 8 per cent-that of the weakest wines. If we suppose that excellent liquor, Bavarian beer, to be half as strong as this, there is room for it to communicate a good deal of fire when consumed on the enormous native scale. In any place of entertainment in Bavaria, if a Kelner sees your beer-flagon empty, he immediately fills it for you without request or hint. Bavarian nature abhors such a vacuum, and the nerves of a kindly Kelner will not permit him to behold such a type of misery as an empty beer-flagon. I was told in this region that the universal passion for beer was made a highly available instrument in the suppression of crime-seeing that in countries where nothing of the

kind prevailed, it is impossible to bring punishment up to so afflictive a height, consistent with the preservation of the criminal's health, as the stopping a Bavarian's beer; while, for the purposes of prison discipline, the power on some occasions slightly to relax the prohibition was a bribe to good conduct, so potent as to leave far behind anything we can accomplish through our inferior social institutions. How much beer the inhabitants of this or any other part of Germany habitually consume, can only be matter of guess-work; but any one who knows the country will not denounce from one to two gallons per day as extravagant. Now, on the supposition of the 4 per cent, a gallon of beer is equivalent to half a bottle of spirits. In the novel by Freytag called 'Debit and Credit,' supposed to be so accurate a picture of German manners, we are told that the average allowance of beer to a packer-the allowance which it is not creditable to him to exceed-is forty pints a-day-more than three gallons, and certainly endowed with more alcohol than a bottle and a half of ordinary spirituous liquor.

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Oh, but for all that, the German does not get drunk in the degraded manner of our working classes, nor expose himself as some even of our better classes do after dinner." Suppose that there is more justice in this statement than there really is, I am prepared to try conclusions between the absolute perniciousness of a vice which is limited in its extent and operation on the one hand, and a received national practice which is prevalent and counted creditable on the other. With us the taking stimulants of any kind has become exceptional. A large number of our gentry take no wine, and a still greater proportion take nothing but the one glass of wine or the one tumbler of beer at dinner. The great bulk of our working men can only afford themselves a glass of gin or of porter on rare occasions. Even if you know a jolly fellow or two who takes his

pint or even his bottle of port after dinner, or his night-cap before going to bed, he has got through the business of the day first-he has not been indulging from morning to night. Nor is he prepared, perhaps, absolutely to justify his practice - it is a weakness, and every man has some weakness. Indeed the great feature distinguishing us in this matter from the Germans is, that the use of stimulants in all forms is looked askance at, and connected more or less with disrepute. It is carried at once into the category of defects, if it do not go so far as to be an absolute vice. One man in a couple of hundred or so, it is true, takes to stimulants all day, and is a lost being; but with this exception, fortunately rare, even the hardest livers among us spend the greater part of the day in an abstinence and restraint unknown to the German.

Persons have been known to come home from their tour in Germany, and tell teetotal meetings that they have seen considerable towns there which did not contain a single shop for the retailing of spirits. But they have omitted to state that, in each of them, there are some ten or twenty huge taverns full of guests from dawn to midnight. The greatness and importance of The Tavern as a national institution-the persistency with which it has retained the predominance it held in the middle ages-is a significant type of the German social condition. With us the hotel and the inn have ceased to be what the tavern was in the days of Walter Mapes, in those of Shakespeare, and even in those of Hogarth. It is but scantily and occasionally frequented for purposes of pure dissipation. There are, indeed, a few people, chiefly ancient bachelors of peculiar habits, to whom the stir and excitement of the tavern are a necessity. They don't, however, meet there as their grandfathers

did, night after night, the same set of cronies, to pursue with them the same orgies. What they have got into the way of enjoying, or rather requiring, is the shifting scene that passes before them in the comers and the goers-it makes up to them in some measure for active life and family ties. With a very few such exceptions, the tavern now exists wholly for the purpose of the wayfarer, whether in business or pleasure.

In almost every age, and among almost every people, the tavern, or the institution substituted for it, has held an influence and character amply deserving commemoration. It received, however, little beyond what local antiquaries supplied about the places of entertainment in their own favourite districts, or the mere casual notices of authors with wider names, until two Frenchmen lately took up the institution as itself worthy of a history, and wrote it in a very commendable manner. From the names of the authors, we may infer that one of them supplied the archæological investigations, and the other did the brilliancy and French polish.* Between them they have produced a very curious book. It runs necessarily through deep and odious strata of vice; but that could not well be avoided, nor was it desirable that it should be avoided, if we wished to know what the human race has been doing here and there from time to time. Necessarily in such an inquiry there is brought out a great deal of the wickedness, tragic and comic, that is the staple material of the low popular romance. But the world ought to know all about such matters when they are realities that have existed, however valueless or worse may be their reflection in the pages of the sensa tional novelist. And since it should be uttered, it is better to have such matter committed to costly typography and paper, and clothed in

'Histoire des Hotelleries, Cabarets, Courtillés, et des anciennes Communautés et Confrériés, &c.' Par Francisque Michel et Edouard Fournier. 2 vols. 8vo. 1859.

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