In England, owing to the severity and uncertainty of the weather, the food and shelter questions go hand in hand. This is not the case in India, where the shelter is not so important as the food, and there is no such urgency in dealing with the former as with the latter. For instance during nine months out of twelve it is not such a very great hardship to sleep in the open air in most parts of India. I have myself done it frequently and so have many of our Officers. It is true that we should not like it as a regular thing, and still less perhaps, if driven to it by absolute want. Still I am perfectly prepared to admit that the circumstances are totally different to that of England, and that the question of shelter is of secondary importance as compared with food.

The time will come when we shall be obliged to face and deal with it. If our scheme meets with the success that we anticipate, having first satisfied the gnawings of these hunger-bitten stomachs, we shall certainly turn round and think next what we can do to provide them with decent homes for themselves and their families.

But we can safely afford to defer the consideration of this question for the present, in order to throw all our time and energy into the solution of the infinitely more urgent and important problem of a regular and sufficient food supply for these destitutes.

At present as I have already pointed out, they are dependent solely on the help of relations and friends and on the doles of the charitable; or on the proceeds of vice and crime. The insufficiency of these to meet the needs of the case I have also, I believe, proved to demonstration.

Therefore one of the first parts of our City programme will be the establishment of cheap food depÔts, at which food of various kinds will be supplied at the lowest possible cost price. These depÔts will be dovetailed in with other parts of our scheme, which have yet to be described, and the one will help to support the other.

It may be objected that if we undertake to sell food at lower than the ordinary market rates, we shall interfere with the legitimate operations of trade. But to this we would answer that the same objection would be still more true in regard to charitable doles, which are given for nothing. And further, we shall fix our prices with a view to covering the actual cost of the food, so that there will not be any probability of our interfering with ordinary market rates. Besides, should there be any very serious difficulty of the kind, we could always make a rule limiting the food sold at these depÔts to those who came under the operation of the other branches of our social reform.

At the outset it would probably be wisest to avoid all caste complications by confining ourselves entirely to uncooked food, leaving the people to do their own cooking, but it is very probable that before long we should be forced to undertake the preparation of cooked food. We should of course pay due regard in this respect to the customs of the various castes, religions and nationalities concerned. To a Hindoo for instance it would be extremely disagreeable to eat out Of the same dish as others, while Mahommedans, as one said to me the other day, only enjoy the meal the more, when others are sitting round the platter. These, however, are subordinate details which would largely settle themselves as we went along. Food in some shape or form, the destitute must have, good in quality and sufficient in quantity, and if they prefer it uncooked this will save us trouble, whereas if cooking becomes necessary we shall have another industry for the employment of many hands. Meanwhile the fact that nearly every native of the poorer castes, be it man, woman, or even child, knows how to cook their own food, is likely to be of no little help in settling the question of the food supply.