SOCIAL NOTES AN ILLUSTRATED Weekly Journal of Social Progress, Reform, and Philanthropic Action. Edited under the direction of THE MARQUIS TOWNSHEND. VOL. II.-No. 23, New Series. VOL. VII.-No. 149, Old Series. JANUARY 7TH, 1881. TEXTS WITHOUT SERMONS. HE mischief done by political partisanship, and the evil passions it develops, is not confined to Ireland. The readiness of the press to seize and plunge into print, without previous investigation, any report which has a tendency to support an attack upon political opponents, was illustrated last week by the circumstantial account of a political riot between English and Irish workmen in Peckham. A paper especially well informed upon all news of local importance - the South London Press, denounces it as either a grossly distorted and exaggerated account of a commonplace quarrel between drunken men, or altogether an invention. * * THE inhabitants of Great Britain consume wheat purchased at a cost of fifty-four millions sterling every year. Two-fifths of that huge sum goes from the country for the imported grain. To reduce the cost of such a necessity, we must decrease the waste of it, and to do this, brown bread must be substituted for white. Wheat contains all the elements necessary for the nourishment of our bodies; it supplies fat and starch for the production of heat and muscular power; gluten and soluble albumen for the production of flesh; mineral and phosphatic salts for the formation of bone and brain. The inner or white part of wheat is nearly all starch, and this goes to make our white The middle portions, consisting of the flesh-forming nitrogenous portions, and the outer, containing the bone-creating elements, we devote to the feeding of our cattle! It is this absurdly-wasteful practice that the Bread Reform League is striving to reform. But the bakers oppose the national good. As the late Dr. Edward Smith said long since, before a committee of the House of Commons, "Brown bread is the rich man's and not the poor man's diet," [Price One Penny. the price of it being much higher than white. RECENT statistics show that the good work of the Act against the adulteration of food has been steadily progressive. While at the close of the year 1878 the number of authorities who had appointed analysts was 201, at the end of last year the number had increased to 237. Of the samples examined fourteen out of every hundred were found to be more or less adulterated, and their entire number was 17'049. articles which enter into the daily consumption of "Taking the percentages of adulterated samples of every household, we find that milk heads the list with a percentage of 14; then comes mustard at |