of England
have come to look upon starvation and suffering, which they call
"distress," as part of the social order. Chronic starvation is looked
upon as a matter of course. It is only when acute starvation makes its
appearance on a large scale that they think something is unusual

I shall never forget the bitter wail of a blind man in a little East End
shop at the close of a murky day. He had been the eldest of five
children, with a mother and no father. Being the eldest, he had starved
and worked as a child to put bread into the mouths of his little brothers
and sisters. Not once in three months did he ever taste meat. He never
knew what it was to have his hunger thoroughly appeased. And he claimed
that this chronic starvation of his childhood had robbed him of his
sight. To support the claim, he quoted from the report of the Royal
Commission on the Blind, "Blindness is more prevalent in poor districts,
and poverty accelerates this dreadful affliction."

But he went further, this blind man, and in his voice was the bitterness
of an afflicted man to whom society did not give enough to eat. He was
one of an enormous army of blind in London, and he said that in the blind
homes they did not receive half enough to eat. He gave the diet for a
day:-

Breakfast--0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.
Dinner --3 oz. meat.
1 slice of bread.
0.5 lb. potatoes.
Supper --0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.

Oscar Wilde, God rest his soul, voices the cry of the prison child,
which, in varying degree, is the cry of the prison man and woman:-

"The second thing from which a child suffers in prison is hunger. The
food that is given to it consists of a piece of usually bad-baked prison
bread and a tin of water for breakfast at half-past seven. At twelve
o'clock it gets dinner, composed of a tin of coarse Indian meal stirabout
(skilly), and at half-past five it gets a piece of dry bread and a tin of
water for its supper. This diet in the case of a strong grown man is
always productive of illness of some kind, chiefly of course diarrhoea,
with its attendant weakness. In fact, in a big prison astringent
medicines are served out regularly by the warders as a matter of course.
In the case of a child, the child is, as a rule, incapable of eating the
food at all. Any one who knows anything about children knows how easily
a child's digestion is upset by a fit of crying, or trouble and mental
distres