of food, this I believe to be an important point, and one which should be held steadily in view.  For the labourer the food must be in part solid, requiring mastication and insalivation, and not rapid of digestion.  Food, however nutritious, which is too quickly digested, is soon followed by a sense of hunger and emptiness, and consequent sinking and debility.  Food of this description is unsuited to the labourer.  It will not maintain strength, nor will it maintain health, and, if long persevered in, it will be followed by some one or other of the prevailing diseases which result immediately from deficient, imperfect, and impoverished blood.”

Again:—­

“Our attention must not be too exclusively directed to soups and other semi-liquid articles of food.  These pass away too rapidly from the stomach, are swallowed too hastily, and violate a natural law in superseding the necessity of mastication, and a proper admixture with the salivary secretion.  Restricted to such food the carnivora cannot maintain life; nor can man, being half carnivorous, if laboriously employed, long preserve health and strength on food of such character....  Food, to be at once sustaining to the labourer, and preventive of disease, must have bulk—­must possess solidity—­must not be rapidly digestible, and must contain, in varied proportions, all the staminal ingredients of nutriment.”

Sir Henry Marsh, said one of the morning journals, did not attack M. Soyer, but he demolished the soup kitchen as effectively as if he did.

As soon as M. Soyer’s model soup depot was completed, he resolved to open it for public inspection with a good deal of ceremony.  On the 5th of April, therefore, the opening day, the space in front of the Royal Barracks presented a very animated scene; flags floated gaily in the breeze; the rich dresses of ladies of birth and fashion contrasted pleasingly with the costly and superb military uniforms among which they moved; and M. Soyer was all politeness in explaining to his distinguished visitors the arrangements and perfections of his soup kitchen.  In a famine-stricken land, the good taste of this exhibition was doubtful enough:  at any rate it was criticised with no sparing hand.

When I got a card of invitation, writes one, I thought I was to see M. Soyer’s peculiar appliances for making soup for the poor; but no—­it was a “gala day:”  drums beating, flags flying.  Then the writer grows political, and says bitterly, that he “envied not the Union flag the position it occupied as it flaunted in triumph from the chimney top of the soup kitchen; it was its natural and most meet position; the rule of which it is the emblem has brought our country to require soup kitchens,—­and no more fitting ornament could adorn their tops.”  All the parade he could, he says, have borne, but what he considered indefensible was the exhibition of some hundreds of Irish beggars “to demonstrate what ravening hunger will make the image of God submit to."[250]