THE END OF SUMMER TIME.
SUMMER time has now only two days to run, and then we must set the clock back. During the last few years we have shown a tendency to revert to the manners of our forefathers in the matter of going to bed and getting up. The altering of the names of the hours during the summer months has served to mask the experiment, and we hardly realize how early we all leave our beds. We have not, however, copied our ancestors in the matter of meal-times, or at any rate the brain workers have not. That is, of course, our breakfast and dinner times have changed by an hour, but they bear the same relation to our rising and retiring that they bore before wo insisted that the law should alter the clock. This great legal reform, by the by, seems to have been desired by sensible men for the last two hundred years. Addison, writing in 1710, laments the unaccountable disposition which he observes "to continue awake in the night and sleep in the sunshine." Not only is there " hardly to be found in Great Britain a lady of quality who ever saw the sun rise," but " modern statesmen are concerting schemes and engaged in the depths of politics at the time when their forefathers were laid down quietly to rest and had nothing in their heads but dreams." Two-thirds of the nation, he vows, "now lie fast asleep for several hours in broad daylight." He has written, he goes on, to a friend in the country to know if any climatic changes could be observed which might account for a wish to change the hours of sleep. But his friend has noticed no alteration in the habits of the sun and his " poultry are still as regular as ever." A few old- fashioned men among the gentry still (in the year 1710) dine at eleven and sup at six, as their ancestors, Addison remarks, have done since the Conquest, but they are getting fewer. He himself has seen the hour of dinner slip from twelve o'clock till three, and where it will end he does not know. Already many families have done away with supper altogether, and at best it has become but a light meal. At the Universities these meal-times were in his day still observed and bear witness to "the hours of the whole nation at the times those places were founded." English monastic hours would seem to have been somewhat later than these, but the Benedictine rule was the one most generally followed, and the midnight prayers probably necessitated an extra hour's sleep in the morning. Addison greatly regrets the disappearance of supper, and would, we suppose, have been pleased with the modern custom which has so greatly increased the importance of the meal and called it dinner. A really " late dinner " is a meal of entirely modern origin. Thackeray wished " his Lucy " to get his leg of mutton " ready at three." A little later in the Victorian era men dined at six, and dinner was not pushed on to eight o'clock till within the memory of middle-aged people. The constant pushing on of the heaviest meal nearer and nearer to bed-time, is, we think, a witness to the longer and longer hours during which the educated have found it necessary to, work for their livings. The thought of a good darner accompanied by beer or wine at three o'clock would seem to most professional men to imply extreme laziness. No one can work after such a dinner, at such a time, they would say no one did work after it, except perhaps doctors and Politicians, in the days of their grandfathers. The day ended earlier, and more leisure was taken as a matter of course. Gout was fearfully prevalent and drunkenness fearfully common. Surely very little can be said for the custom.
We cannot help doubting, however, whether the present plan of eating late, though in many ways so much more reasonable, will last. In the absence of servants it must prove more and more inconvenient. Children must have a good meal in the middle of the day ; and it is becoming more and more difficult for the housekeeper either to cook or to pay for two complete dinners, one to be partaken of at one and the other at eight o'clock. The richer middle class is approaching more and more to the poorer in standard of life, and already the evening meal is becoming a slighter affair. Vast crowds of young men and women dine at restaurants near to their work, and content themselves with a light supper at home when it is over. They do not oat a heavy meal at noon because they cannot work after it, nor at eight o'clock because they cannot get it ; and they take little or no alcohol at either bemuse they cannot afford it The result is that most of the brain workers do not oat more than about two-thirds of what their fathers ate, and one wonders what will be the result of the change. Possibly we may see a revulsion to a still earlier custom. We may imitate the meal-times which still prevail upon the Continent. The English "good breakfast" may be given up and we may snatch a roll and cup of coffee in the early morning and sit down to a square meal at eleven or twelve. However good our appetites, we should not become so sleepy at that hour as we should at three or four o'clock, and the children might as well eat then as later if the schools would shift their time-tables a little. Tea at four and a non-meat meal at eight would possibly then suffice us, and certainly the work of the household, which just now falls so hardly upon the unaccustomed women of what we used to call the servant-keeping class, would be infinitely lightened. The difficulty is that no custom seems able to bo changed in this country under about a hundred years unless some expedient can bo thought of to enforce it without an appearance of tyranny. It is not enough that a change should be generally desired. No alteration of clocks can help us here. We are faced with the problem of keeping hard-working men and women in full health with less money to do it on and less labour to put into the doing of it. It is taken now as an axiom that in the past "we all ate too much," but has that axiom been proved by the war ? Are the civil populations- the better even for the very moderate amount of abstinence which those years forced upon them ? That wo " eat too much " was not the opinion of the very wise men who provisioned the army which won the war. Brain workers are, wo are sure, at the present moment in danger of eating and sleeping too little. The public thought of a plan by which it could get more sunshine out of the day than it had grown accustomed to. Wo ought now to think of one by which the brain workers can get more food, more sleep, and more leisure. But, it may bo said, such a change as you are suggesting would be made at the expense of hospitality. Who can entertain guests at eleven o'clock in the morning ? Certainly that would bo impossible. But who can now afford to show much hospitality at a into meal which must be a large and complete one ? Dinner parties among the poorer professionals are almost dead. They might, however, entertain pretty freely once more if the meal to which they invited their friends were the less important meal of the day and not of necessity a hot meal at all.
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