during the morning, when the market teems with the best of everything. But when the workers reach it, the best has vanished, and, if it was still there, they would probably not be able to buy it.
The potatoes which the workers buy are usually poor, the vegetables wilted, the cheese old and of poor quality, the bacon rancid, the meat lean, tough, taken from old, often diseased, cattle, or such as have died a natural death, and not fresh even then, often half decayed.
The sellers are usually small hucksters who buy up inferior goods, and can sell them cheaply by reason of their badness.
The poorest workers are forced to use still another device to get together the things they need with their few pence.
As nothing can be sold on Sunday, and all shops must be closed at twelve o’clock on Saturday night, such things as would not keep until Monday are sold at any price between ten o’clock and midnight.
But nine-tenths of what is sold at ten o’clock is past using by Sunday morning, yet these are precisely the provisions which make up the Sunday dinner of the poorest class.
The meat which the workers buy is very often past using; but having bought it, they must eat it.
On the 6th of January, 1844 (if I am not greatly mistaken), a court leet was held in Manchester, when eleven meat-sellers were fined for having sold tainted meat. Each of them had a whole ox or pig, or several sheep, or from fifty to sixty pounds of meat, which were all confiscated in a tainted condition. In one case, sixty-four stuffed Christmas geese were seized which had proved unsaleable in Liverpool, and had been forwarded to Manchester, where they were brought to market foul and rotten. All the particulars, with