and sheep in this country
than on the continent of Europe, and this disproportion has been
maintained.

But the increase of population has led to a considerable change in the
diet of a very large proportion--the poorer part--of the community.
Whilst the families of the better-paid working class and all the
middle and upper class continue to eat meat, the agricultural labourer
and the poorer workmen in towns live chiefly on flour, sugar, bacon,
and cheese. Probably they have become habituated to this diet, and,
provided that the quantity is sufficient, it cannot be maintained that
the diet, in which meat is nearly or altogether absent, is unhealthy.
Many vigorous and muscularly well-developed populations in other lands
thrive on exclusively vegetable food.

A curious and not altogether comforting reflection is that if the
inexpensive and simple food of the agricultural labourer is
sufficient, the section of the community which spends from five to ten
shillings per head a day on a mixed diet of meat, fish, eggs, and
vegetables is guilty of waste and excess. Here, however, the
remarkable, and, in fact, exceptional domination of "habit" (in the
case of man), in regard to both the actual articles of food and the
mode of its preparation, has to be recognised. Such and such
inexpensive and unskilfully prepared food may contain more than the
necessary amount of proteids (that is, matters like flesh, the casein
of cheese and of vegetables, and the albumen of eggs), of
hydro-carbons (_i.e._, fats), of carbo-hydrates (_i.e._, starch and
sugar), yet if you were suddenly to compel a man accustomed to
well-cooked meat to live on such food he would be unable to assimilate
it, his digestive organs would refuse to work, and he would become, if
not seriously ill, yet so ill-nourished and sickly that he would be
unfit for his work and readily fall a victim to disease. It is, in
fact, impossible to lay down any scheme of diet based on the mere
provision of the necessary quantities of food materials whilst
ignoring the formed habits of the individual and the relation of the
psychical conditions which we call "taste," "appetite," "fancy,"
"disgust," to the actual processes of digestion and the consequent
efficiency of the proposed diet.

No doubt gradually, after a few generations, a whole people may become
healthily habituated to a diet which would have been positively
injurious to their forebears, and no doubt individuals may be led by