153. "What," says the cottager, "has all this to do with hogs and bacon?" Not directly with hogs and bacon, indeed; but it has a great deal to do, my good fellow with your affairs, as I shall, probably, hereafter more fully show, though I shall now leave you to the enjoyment of your flitches of bacon, which, as I before observed, will do ten thousand times more than any Methodist parson, or any other parson (except, of course, those of _our_ church) to make you happy, not only in this world, but in the world to come. _Meat in the house_ is a great source of _harmony_, a great preventer of the temptation to commit those things, which, from small beginnings, lead, finally, to the most fatal and atrocious results; and I hold that doctrine to be _truly damnable_, which teaches that God has made any selection, any condition relative to belief, which is to save from punishment those who violate the principles of _natural justice_.
154. _Some_ other meat you may have; but, bacon is the great thing. It is always ready; as good cold as hot; goes to the field or the coppice conveniently; in harvest, and other busy times, demands the pot to be boiled only on a Sunday; has twice as much strength in it as any other thing of the same weight; and in short, has in it every quality that tends to make a labourer's family able to work and well off. One pound of bacon, such as that which I have described, is, in a labourer's family, worth four or five of ordinary mutton or beef, which are great part _bone_, and which, in short, are gone in a moment. But always observe, it is _fat bacon_ that I am talking about. There will, in spite of all that can be done, be _some_ lean in the gammons, though comparatively very little; and therefore you ought to begin at that end of the flitches; for, _old lean bacon_ is not good.
155. Now, as to the _cost_. A pig (a _spayed sow_ is best) bought in March four months old, can be had now for fifteen shillings. The cost till fatting time is next to nothing to a Cottager; and then the cost, at the present price of corn, would, for a hog of twelve score, not exceed _three pounds_; in the whole _four pounds five_; a pot of poison a week bought at the public-house comes to _twenty-six shillings_ of the money; and more than _three times the remainder_ is generally flung away upon the miserable _tea_, as I have clearly shown in the First Number, at Paragraph 24. I have, indeed, there shown, that if the tea were laid aside, the labourer might supply his family well with beer all the year round, and have a fat hog of even _fifteen score_ for the _cost of the tea_, which does him and can do him _no good at all_.