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are substantial food; so that in barley there are only eight parts out of a hundred but what will afford sustenance to man. A medical man at Munich had a number of persons under his care to feed, and he found, from some considerable experience, that soup made out of pearl barley, split peas, and potatoes, which, when it had boiled about three hours, he poured upon some bread cut small, yielded one of the most satisfying, wholesome, and nutritious diets, he could produce. He ascertained that nineteen ounces of this soup afforded sufficient nourishment for a fullgrown person. There was no animal food or fat in it, he only added to it a little salt and a little vinegar. I have made a meal on this preparation, and therefore know that this statement which may be found in the London Encyclopædia, under the article "food," is perfectly correct. I mention this fact, because, in the case just narrated, the gentleman found that no other substance was a substitute for the barley, he tried flour, rice, and other things, but the soup was never found to be so nutritious and strengthening. The fact, therefore, shows the very great nutrient properties of the grain.

Proust, who made a great many experiments upon barley, declares that he found in it "a peculiar proximate principle," which, from the Latin name of the grain, he has called" hordein." He describes it as 66 a yellow, woody powder, granular to the touch and resembling sawdust in appearance. It was insoluble in water, whether boiling or cold." This hordein is, no doubt, the the peculiar nutrient principle of which the gentleman at Munich spoke so highly, and which rendered his Bavarian soup so very satisfying. But the reader will observe that, in converting the barley into malt, this hordein, of which there are fifty-five parts out of a hundred in the grain in its natural state, is reduced to twelve parts in the hundred, so that forty-three parts are actually gone: the sugar and the gum of the barley are increased, but then those are nothing like so nutritious as the hordein; and it is well known also, that the starch which is increased in the malt, though not equal to the quantity of hordein that is lost, is not soluble, and, therefore, is not found in the beer. This most substantial part of the malt is left in the grains, and given to the pigs, or found in the bottom of the cask after the beer has been drawn off, and, in most instances, thrown away.

It is allowed by brewers, on all hands, that six pounds of barley will make a gallon of good ale. In these six pounds you have ninety-six ounces, and in these you have full eighty-eight parts of solid nourishment; but, gentle reader, you will do well to observe, that in your gallon of beer you have not ten ounces of nourishment. So that in manufacturing beer you actually lose very nearly eighty parts out of eighty-eight, and all that you obtain in the place of it is upwards of three ounces of spirits of wine, or alcoholic poison, and which constitutes the strength of the liquor. What would you think of the man who should buy ninety-six ounces of wheat, and by making it grow, drying it, pouring hot water upon it, giving a part to the pigs, and throwing a part down the gutter, should waste upwards of eighty ounces, and should leave for himself and family only ten ounces? What, if he did this for the purpose of getting about four ounces of poison which will injure his health, destroy his reason, and corrupt his heart? Would you say that God sent the grain to be thus wasted, or would you call the poison, which the ingenuity of this prodigal had extracted, “a good creature of God ?"

Much has been said of waste and extravagance, but we know of no instance or example that will bear any parallel with the prodigality that is practised in converting barley into malt, and malt into beer. Cleopatra is said to have dissolved a precious gem in her glass, and to have drunk it at a banquet, as a proof of the little value she could afford to set upon what was costly but gems are less valuable than the food which God has created for the sustenance of life, and therefore he who destroys the precious grain of the earth destroys what is more valuable than pearls, and his criminality is not a little enhanced, that he does this for the purpose of producing a poison.

Should any one doubt what has just been stated, let him weigh a pint of beer and a pint of water, and he will then find that a pint of beer weighs lighter than a pint of water, showing that it is not a very substantial beverage, although so much grain has been squandered and spoiled to produce it. Let him apply

a heat to his pint of beer, and at 170 degrees the spirit will begin to go off in the form of a fiery vapor. At 212 degrees his beer will boil, and then steam will begin to depart; if he will con

tinue the boiling long enough, every particle of the water will be evaporated in the form of steam, and the powder which will remain, and which is all the nutriment of the liquor, will weigh about an ounce. If he had condensed and weighed the spirit that escaped, he would have found it to have weighed, if the beer was strong, upwards of half an ounce. If he will condense the steam and weigh that, he will have fourteen ounces of water, and, as stated already, there will be left somewhere about an ounce of food. If he will taste this powder and examine it, he will hesitate about admitting it to his stomach. With the farina of wheat, or of barley, it is not fit to be compared. It has been grown, roasted, scalded, boiled, embittered, fermented, and drenched with water and alcohol, till it seems neither fit for the land nor the dunghill, much less for a human stomach. Such then is the waste and the wickedness of getting beer out of barley. If we examined distillation we should find the matter still worse; for in producing spirit, no nourishment whatever is left in the liquor, and therefore all the goodness of the barley is wasted or converted into an undiluted poison.

In the manufacture of cider we are equally guilty of waste and extravagance. The apple is a nutritious fruit. It is particularly suited to our climate, and is intended to be to us, what the grape is to other lands, and would we attend to its culture more, the grapes of Palestine could hardly compete with it. The apple can sustain human life, and horses can perform a great degree of work and labor when fed by it. Sheep and cows can be fed and fatted with it. A neighbor of mine fatted a fine pig on apples and barley-meal, and the flesh obtained from this kind of feed was most delicious. It thrived much better upon apples and meal than it would upon potatoes and meal, and not half the quantity of meal was used. Here, then, we have the two substances, barley and apples, usually employed and wasted to produce a desolating spirit, converted into wholesome animal food. In producing cider, we have a wholesome and nutritious fruit converted into poison. If the reader doubts this statement, he has only to serve a pint of cider as we have directed him to treat a pint of beer, and collect first the spirit, then the water, and, when both water and spirits are evaporated, to weigh the portion of dust or powder

that will be left behind. Here he will find that the nutritious portion is small indeed, not perhaps more than a quarter of an

ounce.

The remarks made concerning apples might, in some degree, be applied to the manufacture of wine from grapes, except, as we shall presently show, that the ancients understood the way of preserving the grape without allowing it to ferment, and therefore retained its nutritious qualities. In Scripture, " to eat the fruit of the vine," as well as to drink its juice, "is a common expression," showing that the grape, both when ripe and when dried, was, with the Easterns, a common article of food. We are not denying that the juice was expressed, and in some cases allowed to ferment; we are merely asserting that it was an article of food, and that fermentation changed it into a poison. If the reader will take the trouble to analyze his wines, whether home-made or foreign, he will find alcohol, water, and an extract of a color, quality, and quantity that will convince him of the folly and prodigality of wasting the fruits of the earth by changing them into alcoholic poisons. All the medical testimonies we have given prove that the ardent spirit obtained from malt, apples, or grapes, "holds a natural enmity with the blood of man,” and therefore we are better without it. As for the fourteen ounces of water which will be found in every pint of beer, cider, or wine, we can obtain it much purer from the pump than from the beer-barrel, and the nutriment in either can bear no comparison with a mouthful of common wh eaten bread.

To what purpose then do we waste forty millions of bushels of barley, and devote 1,048,000 acres of land to the production of grain and hops, all of which might be employed in a more useful, benevolent, and profitable manner? The land, if let to the poor, would be sufficient to relieve the parishes from the burden of almost every pauper. The produce would make two or three millions of persons happy, and these poor people would pay as good rent for the land as is now given by the wealthier farmer, while by spade husbandry, which their capital, alias leisure, enables them to employ, they would obtain a much more abundant crop. We complain of crime, disease

and pauperism, and yet to produce all three together, we sacrifice forty millions of bushels of grain, and worse than allow to lie fallow one million and forty-eight thousand acres of excellent land. The land God has given us, he has watered it from his clouds, and warmed it with his sun, but never did he intend that we should use his ground and clouds and sun to corrupt, starve, and destroy, any portion of the human family.

From what has just been advanced, we perceive what a deception and fraud is practised upon the laboring man, by his being taught to believe that beer is a highly nourishing beverage, and essential to his strength and labor. The spirit warms and stimulates him just as a spur or whip may quicken the movements of a wearied horse, but neither the spirit in the one case, nor the whip in the other, imparts any real substantial strength: indeed both must be in the end the cause of increased debility. A hard-working man wants nothing to increase his circulation, his labor keeps his heart and pulse in a healthy tone, and his blood naturally flows at a rate most conducive to vigor and longevity. All that he needs to repair the waste of his system, is good nourishing food. Why then cheat him with spirit instead of giving him bread? How dreadfully also he is robbed, by paying the enormous sum he does for the small and coarse portion of food that is in his pint of beer, porter, or cider. In the pint of liquor which costs him twopence, he has perhaps one ounce of most indigestible food. To get a pound of it, he must pay two shillings and eightpence, must drink nearly two gallons of water, and swallow, perhaps, little less than a pound of acrid poison.

Surely Divine providence never intended that nutrition should be obtained at such a roundabout, dangerous, and expensive a rate as this. What if bread or meat were sold at the price of two and eightpence a pound, a famine must immediately ensue, and yet this is the price that brewer and landlord charge for their self-styled nutritious drinks, which they impregnate with poison into the bargain. Strange to say, also, these persons are monopolizing the trade of the country, and paralyzing our manufacturing and mechanical industry. If men pay at the rate of two and eightpence a pound for nourishment, is it wonder

any

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