Fancy attempting
nowadays to live a single day without sugar; no tea, no coffee, no jam,
no pudding, no cake, no sweets, no hot toddy before one goes to bed; the
bare idea of it is too terrible. And yet that was really the abject
condition of all the civilised world up to the middle of the middle
ages. Horace's punch was sugarless and lemonless; the gentle Virgil
never tasted the congenial cup of afternoon tea; and Socrates went from
his cradle to his grave without ever knowing the flavour of peppermint
bull's eyes. How the children managed to spend their Saturday _as_, or
their weekly _obolus_, is a profound mystery. To be sure, people had
honey; but honey is rare, dear, and scanty; it can never have filled one
quarter the place that sugar fills in our modern affections. Try for a
moment to realise drinking honey with one's whisky-and-water, or doing
the year's preserving with a pot of best Narbonne, and you get at once a
common measure of the difference between the two as practical
sweeteners. Nowadays, we get sugar from cane and beet-root in abundance,
while sugar-maples and palm-trees of various sorts afford a considerable
supply to remoter countries. But the childhood of the little Greeks and
Romans must have been absolutely unlighted by a single ray of joy from
chocolate creams or Everton toffee.
The consequence of this excessive production of sweets in modern times
is, of course, that we have begun to distrust the indications afforded
us by the sense of taste in this particular as to the wholesomeness of
various objects.
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