CHAPTER I: FOOD AND EFFORT - Yves Guyot, The Comedy of Protection [1906]
Edition used:
The Comedy of Protection, trans. M.A. Hamilton (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906).
About Liberty Fund:
Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.
Copyright information:
The text is in the public domain.
Fair use statement:
This material is put online to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. Unless otherwise stated in the Copyright Information section above, this material may be used freely for educational and academic purposes. It may not be used in any way for profit.
CHAPTER I
FOOD AND EFFORT
The diet of the French soldier—Insufficient nourishment and work—Temperance of the Japanese soldier.
The diet of the French soldier has been taken as the standard. Allowing for waste it is a good deal below Atwater’s estimate of the necessary diet for an adult occupied in moderately active work, nevertheless it is among the highest. Although French army bread is only made of meal containing 29 per cent. of chaff, it stands first among the military rations of the world, containing 14·69 of azotic matter to 7·20 in the Prussian army bread. The meat ration is about 13 oz. in England, about 12 in Germany, and 101/2 in France; but in Austria it is only 67/9 oz., in Italy and Russia 71/9, in Belgium 88/9, and in Sweden 93/6. Since humanity has survived and developed on a diet much below that established physiologically by Atwater, or empirically in the case of the French soldier, neither can be assumed as absolutely necessary. But neither the Neapolitan lazzarone who lies in the sun and feeds on a slice of melon, or the Russian moujik sleeping on his stove in winter and satisfied with some cabbages and cucumber cooked in pickle, is capable of effort. At any particular moment an underfed man may make an effort, but he cannot sustain it for long. The Kabyle is sober and a hard worker, but all over Algeria they say, “You can tell the mark of a Frenchman’s ploughshare from that of a Kabyle.” Teachers of the young, moralists who assume the direction of others without always being able to direct themselves, are always praising temperance, and that to men who have not food enough for their physical needs; talking of the dignity of labour to men with empty stomachs. It would be just as reasonable to expect an engine to move without coal. They might think of the letter Marshal St. Arnaud wrote to Ducos, the Naval Minister, at the end of April, 1854, “There is no coal anywhere; Ducos orders us to stoke with the sailors’ patriotism!”
Those doctors who, apparently inheritors of the theories of Diaforus and M. Purgon, ordered their patients a diet of hot water, thought to score a triumph in the victory of the Japanese in the late war. But the Japanese do not live on air. Lieutenant-Colonel Gertsch, Swiss Chief of Staff with the Japanese army, states: “The diet of the regiments in the field was excellent. There was plenty of rice; also spiced preserved meat in a sort of tomato sauce, and dried fish.”
Camille Rousset, “History of the Crimean War,” Vol. I., p. 95.
Titles (by Subject) 