31.  Before I dismiss this affair of eating and drinking, let me beseech you to resolve to free yourselves from the slavery of the tea and coffee and other slop-kettle, if, unhappily, you have been bred up in such slavery.  Experience has taught me, that those slops are injurious to health:  until I left them off (having taken to them at the age of 26), even my habits of sobriety, moderate eating, early rising; even these were not, until I left off the slops, sufficient to give me that complete health which I have since had.  I pretend not to be a ‘doctor;’ but, I assert, that to pour regularly, every day, a pint or two of warm liquid matter down the throat, whether under the name of tea, coffee, soup, grog, or whatever else, is greatly injurious to health.  However, at present, what I have to represent to you is the great deduction, which the use of these slops makes, from your power of being useful, and also from your power to husband your income, whatever it may be, and from whatever source arising.  I am to suppose you to be desirous to become a clever and a useful man; a man to be, if not admired and revered, at least to be respected.  In order to merit respect beyond that which is due to very common men, you must do something more than very common men; and I am now going to show you how your course must be impeded by the use of the slops.

32.  If the women exclaim, ‘Nonsense! come and take a cup,’ take it for that once; but hear what I have to say.  In answer to my representation regarding the waste of time which is occasioned by the slops, it has been said, that let what may be the nature of the food, there must be time for taking it.  Not so much time, however, to eat a bit of meat or cheese or butter with a bit of bread.  But, these may be eaten in a shop, a warehouse, a factory, far from any fire, and even in a carriage on the road.  The slops absolutely demand fire and a congregation; so that, be your business what it may; be you shopkeeper, farmer, drover, sportsman, traveller, to the slop-board you must come; you must wait for its assembling, or start from home without your breakfast; and, being used to the warm liquid, you feel out of order for the want of it.  If the slops were in fashion amongst ploughmen and carters, we must all be starved; for the food could never be raised.  The mechanics are half-ruined by them.  Many of them are become poor, enervated creatures; and chiefly from this cause.  But is the positive cost nothing?  At boarding-schools an additional price is given on account of the tea slops.  Suppose you to be a clerk, in hired lodgings, and going to your counting-house at nine o’clock.  You get your dinner, perhaps, near to the scene of your work; but how are you to have the breakfast slops without a servant?  Perhaps you find a lodging just to suit you, but the