onably be expected to follow from the rigorous carrying out of such
a plan for a time. The fear lest a larger and larger number of parents
might endeavour to rid themselves of the direct care of their children,
if this plan were adopted, need not deter us. If this plan were carried
into practice, then some extension of the scope of the Industrial Acts
would be rendered necessary, and some such extension seems to have been
in the minds of the Select Committee in their Report on the Education
(Provision of Meals) Bill, 1906, in considering their
recommendations.[21]

But the importance of the two classes of cases already considered sinks
into comparative insignificance compared with the third class of cases.
Temporary underfeeding caused by temporary poverty can be met in many
ways without to any appreciable degree lessening the sense of the moral
obligation of the parent to provide the personal necessities of food and
clothing for his children. In the case, again, of the persistently
dissolute and neglectful parent, moral considerations have ceased to
operate, and so the individual by some method or other must be forced to
perform whatever part of the obligation can be exacted from him.

But in the third class of cases parental responsibility may be an active
and willing force, yet the means available may be so limited in extent
that the child is in the chronic condition of being underfed. No one who
carefully considers the information recently supplied by the Board of
Education as to the methods of feeding the children attending Public
Elementary Schools in the great Continental cities and in America can
arrive at any other conclusion than that here we are in the presence of
an evil not local but general, and apparently incidental to the
organisation of the modern industrial State. For whether by voluntary
agencies, by municipal grants, or by State aid, every great Continental
city has found it necessary to organise and institute some system of
feeding school children.

The only inference to be drawn from such a condition of things is that
in a large number of cases the normal wages of the labourer are
insufficient to maintain himself and his family in anything like a
decent standard of comfort. How large a proportion of the population of
our great cities is in this condition it is difficult exactly to
estimate, but there is no doubt that a very considerable number of cases
of the chronic underfeeding of school childr