The evidence which has been presented in the preceding chapter as to the benefits resulting from the feeding of school children would have evoked, fifty, or even twenty years ago, a simple and decisive retort. Granted, it would have been argued, that the health and educational capacity of the children is deteriorated by lack of nourishment, that irreparable and preventible damage is inflicted, and that the provision of meals by a public authority averts this evil for many and mitigates it for all; yet no plea of immediate expediency can stand against the ultimate loss involved in any public assumption of the cost of providing maintenance for children. If a local authority supplies part, even a small part, of their food, parental responsibility is, pro tanto, diminished, with results disastrous not only to the character of the parents but to the prospects of the children themselves. For if parents receive assistance in one direction from a public authority, they will soon clamour to receive assistance in other directions as well. In order to qualify for it, they will neglect their children, who will thus benefit in one way only to be victimized in others. The children themselves, having been fed from public funds, will be trained in habits of dependence, and, when they grow up, will insist on still further provision being made for their children in their turn. Thus one tiny breach in the walls of the family will insensibly be widened till it admits a flood in which domestic affections and the integrity of the home, "relations dear, and all the charities of father, son, and brother" are submerged.

If such anticipations seem exaggerated, they have nevertheless played an important part in determining the policy pursued in England towards more than one question, and lie behind many of the criticisms which are passed on certain recent forms of social intervention. The idea that relief given to the child must be regarded as relief given to the parent, and that, if given at all, it must be accompanied by severe restrictions, was enunciated emphatically in the Poor Law Report of 1834—indeed that famous document scarcely mentions children except in so far as the treatment of adults is influenced by these appendages—and has since become a settled part of Poor Law policy. The fear that parental responsibility might be weakened was a criticism brought against the Education Act of 1870, against the abolition of school fees in 1894, and against the provision of medical treatment for school children under the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act of 1907. Naturally, therefore, the public provision of meals for school children has not escaped the criticism that it would weaken the bond between parent and child and ultimately result in "the breaking up of the home." "To remove the spur to exertion and self-restraint," reported a special committee of the Charity Organisation Society in 1887, "which the spectacle of his children's hunger must be to any man in whom the feelings of natural kindness are not altogether dead, is to assume a very grave responsibility, and perhaps to take away the last chance of re-establishing the character and fortunes of the breadwinner, and, with him, the fortunes of the whole household. It is true, no doubt, that there are parents who are past redemption by influences of this kind, but the majority of the committee are of opinion that it is better in the interests of the community to allow, in such cases, the sins of the parents to be visited on the children than to impair the principle of the solidarity of the family and run the risk of permanently demoralising large numbers of the population by the offer of free meals to their children."^[528]

Now it is obvious that an economic policy which was determined primarily by a consideration for the "solidarity of the family" would lead to far-reaching measures of industrial reorganisation. If the ideal is a society in which "the bread-winner" is by his "exertion and self-restraint" to guarantee "the fortunes of his whole household," the immediate object of attack must be those industrial evils which effectually prevent him from doing so at present, and of which the principal are low wages, casual labour, recurrent periods of unemployment and bad housing. That a crusade conducted in the interests of the family against these regular features of modern industry is entirely desirable need not be questioned. But in its absence it is obvious that, so far from allowing "the sins of the parents to be visited on the children," what we are really doing is to allow the sins of the employer to be visited on the employed or the sins of the community to be visited upon future generations of unborn children, and it seems almost frivolous to ascribe the results of this constant and vicarious sacrifice to the measures which, like the provision of school meals, are directed merely to the partial mitigation of some of its worst effects. The truth is, to put the matter bluntly, that what breaks up the family is not the presence of food but its absence, and that, if the public conscience is unperturbed by the spectacle of numerous homes in which economic circumstances have deprived the parents of the means of providing meals for their children themselves, its sudden sensitiveness at the thought of meals being provided by some external authority would be ludicrous if it did not lead to such tragic consequences. The reader who reflects on the thousands of dock-labourers in London, Liverpool and Glasgow who, through no fault of their own, can obtain only three days' work a week, or on the 25 to 30 per cent. of the working-class population of Reading who have been shown by Professor Bowley to be receiving a total family income below the low standard fixed by Mr. Rowntree,^[529] and to be receiving it, in 49 per cent. of the cases, because they are "in regular work but at low wages,"^[530] will scarcely argue that the mere provision of meals, however injudicious he may regard it, is likely to contribute seriously to the weakening of family relationships which have been already strained or broken by industrial anarchy or industrial tyranny. Sublata causa tollitur effectus. But does any one seriously believe that a cessation of school meals would restore the desired "solidarity of the family" to the casual or sweated labourer?

If the suggestion that the provision of meals is a principal cause undermining parental responsibility is fantastic, is the suggestion that it must necessarily exercise some influence in that direction better founded? We shall deal later with such facts as can be used to throw light on this question. But we may point out here that the idea underlying it usually derives part of its cogency in the minds of many of its supporters less from any concrete evidence than from an implicit assumption that there is a "natural" division of duties between public authorities and the individual citizen, and that any redistribution of them between these two parties, which removes one function from the latter to the former, must necessarily result in the undermining of character, the weakening of the incentive to self-maintenance, the decay of parental responsibility, in short, in all the phenomena of the process known as "pauperisation." Now we need scarcely point out that, stated in this crude form, the theory that every assumption of fresh responsibilities by public authorities results in the undermining of character has no foundation in the experience of mankind. It is, of course, quite true that any sudden removal from an individual of duties which he has hitherto been accustomed to discharge may result in weakening the springs of effort. It is also quite true that any sudden addition to his responsibilities may result in crushing them, and that, as far as the more poorly paid ranks of labour are concerned, energies are far more often worn out in a hopeless struggle than sapped by an insidious ease. But by themselves these facts prove nothing as to the manner in which burdens, duties, responsibilities, should be distributed between the community and its individual members. What experience shows is that there is no "natural" allocation of functions, but that there has been throughout history at once a constant addition to, and a constant re-arrangement of them, and that the former process is quite compatible with the latter. Nor is there any ground for the idea that the extension of the activities of public bodies must necessarily result in accelerating the approach of the state of economic and moral inertia described by those who anticipate it as "Pauperism." If that were the case, all civilised communities would, indeed, have been hastening to destruction from a time "whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." For our fathers had no elementary education, our grandfathers no municipal water, and few lamp-posts; while our great-grandfathers enjoyed the independence derived from the possession of relatively few roads, and those of a character sufficiently bad to offer the most powerful incentives to the energy and self-reliance of the pedestrian. On this theory the citizen of Manchester would be more pauperised than the citizen of London; both would be seriously pauperised compared with the peasant of Connemara; while the wretched inhabitants of German municipalities would be wallowing in a perfect quagmire of perpetual pauperism. Why indeed should one stop here? There have been periods in history in which not only these functions, but the organisation of justice and the equipment of military forces have been left to the bracing activities of private individuals; and an enquiry into the decline and fall of individual independence would, if logically pursued, lead us into dim regions of history far anterior to the Norman Conquest. The origins of modern pauperism, like the origins of modern liberty, are to be sought among "the primeval forests of Germany!"

While, however, there is no foundation for the doctrine that every extension of public provision results in a slackening of energy on the part of the individual, it is, none the less, possible that this may be the result of the particular kind of provision which consists in the supplying of meals to school children. In the event of that being proved to be the case, it is by no means easy to say what policy should be pursued. Public authorities, it may be argued, should cease to provide school meals. To this answer, which is at first sight plausible, there are two objections which are together almost insuperable. The first is that Education Authorities are under a legal obligation to provide education for the children in their charge and to carry out medical inspection with a view to discovering their ailments; while they may, if they think fit, provide medical treatment for them. They owe it to their constituents to spend their money in the most effective and economical manner. Education given to children who are suffering from want of nourishment not only is ineffective, but may be positively deleterious. When the extent of malnutrition is known, is it reasonable to expect the Authorities deliberately to shut their eyes to the fact that so far from benefiting the children who suffer from it they may be positively aggravating their misfortunes? If it be replied, ruat coelum fiat justitia, let the children suffer in order to improve the moral character of their parents, an Education Committee may not unfairly retort that it is elected primarily to attend to the welfare of the children, and that the wisdom of elevating parents, who ex hypothesi are demoralised, at the cost of the rising generation is, at any rate, too problematical to justify it in neglecting its own special duties. Moreover, even assuming that public bodies were willing to apply to the education of children the principles recommended in 1834 for the treatment of "improvidence and vice," there is no reason to suppose that they would succeed in averting the "pauperisation" which is dreaded. No fact is more clearly established by the history of all kinds of relief administration since 1834 than that the effect of refusing to make public provision for persons in distress is merely to lead to the provision of assistance in a rather more haphazard, uncoordinated and indiscriminate manner by private agencies. A purely negative policy is systematically "blacklegged" by private philanthropists. Rightly or wrongly the plain man finds his stomach turned by the full gospel of deterrence; with the result that, while the English Poor Law is nominally deterrent, enormous sums are spent every year in private charity in London alone; that in 1886 the Local Government Board recommended local authorities to provide relief for certain classes of workers apart from the Poor Law, on the ground that the Poor Law, for whose administration the Local Government Board is responsible, is necessarily degrading; and that, finally, a special Act had to be passed in 1905 creating authorities to administer assistance for unemployed workmen whom public opinion would no longer allow to be left to the tender mercies of a deterrent policy of Poor Relief. That the same result would follow with even greater certainty were public bodies to decline to provide for necessitous school children is obvious, inasmuch as to the foolish sentimentality of the ordinary person the sufferings of childhood make a special appeal. Indeed it has followed already. In the days when Education Authorities had no power to spend public money on the provision of meals for school children, what happened was that the provision of meals was begun by private persons, and in the towns which have not put the Act of 1906 into force such private provision obtains at the present day. Such extra-legal intervention has all the disadvantages ascribed to the public provision of meals, for one can scarcely accept the extravagant contention that while soup supplied by an Education Authority pauperises, soup tickets supplied by a philanthropic society do not. And it has few of its advantages. For private philanthropy tends to be more irregular and arbitrary in its administration than most public authorities. Since it cannot cover the whole area of distress, its selection of children to be fed is more capricious; since its funds are raised by appeals ad misericordiam they often fail when they are needed most; and when, as often happens, more than one agency enters the field, the result is overlapping and duplication. Nor will it seem a minor evil to those who care for the civic spirit that even the best-intentioned charity can never escape from the taint of patronage, can never be anything but a sop with which the rich relieve their consciences by ministering to the poor.

The statement that the feeding of school children weakens parental responsibility presumably means that the provision of meals at school induces parents to neglect to provide meals themselves. When one turns from these general considerations to examine how far this result has actually occurred, one is faced with the task of sifting a few grains of fact from a multitude of impressions. The first and most essential preliminary to the formation of any reasonable judgment is to determine the circumstances of those families one or more of whose members are receiving meals at school; and in order to throw some light on this point we give, in the following table, such particulars from six areas as are available:—^[531]

It will be seen that the four largest classes of families consist of those in which the father is casually employed, is disabled by illness or accident, is dead or is unemployed. If one adds to these 605 families the 41 in which the father is paid low wages or is working short time, there is a total of 646 out of 718 families in which distress is due either to industrial causes or to a misfortune. Since men do not usually contract illness or die in order that their children may be fed at school, there is no question of the responsibility of the father being weakened in the 285 cases in which death or ill-health was the cause which led to the provision of school meals.

It is often argued, however, that the public provision of assistance is itself one cause of the distress which it is designed to relieve, because it must necessarily exercise a deteriorating influence over industrial conditions. The knowledge that his children will be fed is likely, it is said, to lead a man to relax the demands which he makes on his employer. The knowledge that he need not offer a subsistence wage for a family leads the employer to offer worse terms to his employees, more irregular employment or lower rates of wages, with the result that the ratepayer relieves the employer of part of his wage bill. Cut off all public assistance, and "economic conditions will adjust themselves to the change." Now it is perfectly true that the need which prompts the provision of school meals does normally arise from bad industrial conditions, and that to allow those conditions to continue while merely mitigating their effects is an offence against morality and an outrage on commonsense. Whether school meals are desirable or not for their own sake, it is the right of the worker that industry should be organised in such a way that he should be able to provide for his children in the manner which he thinks best, and that he should not be compelled (as he often is at present) to choose between seeing them fed at school and seeing them half-starved at home. But the theory which we have stated goes much further than this. It holds that public provision is a cause of bad industrial conditions, and that the mere abolition of public provision would in itself result in those conditions being improved. It is obvious that, as far as certain economic evils are concerned, this doctrine does not hold good. Many children are underfed because their parents are suffering from sickness or accident incurred in the course of their employment. Clearly an employer will not be induced to render his processes safe merely by the fact that his employees' children will suffer if they are unsafe. Many children are underfed because their parents are casually employed or altogether unemployed. Equally clearly there is no reason whatever to suppose that casual labour would cease because of their starvation; for if that were the case it would have ceased long ago. Nor again does the more specious doctrine that the wages of men are lowered by the provision of food for their children rest upon a securer foundation. In the nature of things it can neither be verified nor disproved by an appeal to facts; for the controversy is not concerning facts but concerning their interpretation. If we point out that in Bradford, when the Education (Provision of Meals) Act was first adopted in 1907, the majority of children fed were children of woolcombers, dyers' labourers, carters and builders' labourers, and that since 1907 the first three classes of workers have all received advances of wages, it may, of course, be answered that the advance would have been still greater if the children had not been fed.^[532] In reality, however, the more this theory that the feeding of school children acts as a subsidy to wages is examined, the weaker does it appear. Historically it is traceable to the popular rendering of Ricardo introduced by Senior into the Poor Law Report of 1834, and it still contains marks of its origin. It assumes, in the first place, that wages are never above "subsistence level." For, clearly, if they are above it, there is no reason why they should be lowered if the cost of keeping a family is somewhat reduced. It assumes, in the second place, that they are never below the subsistence level of a family; for clearly, if they are, that in itself proves that the absence of public provision has not been able to maintain them. It assumes, in the third place, that the ability of workers to resist a reduction or to insist on an advance depends not upon the profitableness of the industry, nor upon the strength of their organisation, but solely upon their necessities. Of these assumptions the first two are untrue, and the last is not only untrue, but the exact opposite of the truth. In reality, as every trade unionist knows, the necessities of the non-wage earning members of a family do not keep wages up; they keep them down. A man who knows that a stoppage of work will plunge his family in starvation has little resisting power, and acquiesces in oppression to which he would otherwise refuse to submit. It is the strikers' wives and children who really break many strikes, and if the pressure of immediate necessity is removed the worker is not less likely, he is more likely, to hold out for better terms.

Nor is there much more substance in the theory that the provision of meals by a public authority weakens family life by "undermining parental responsibility." We are not, of course, concerned to deny that in the working classes as well as in the propertied classes there are a certain number of persons who are anxious "to get something for nothing." Cases, no doubt, do arise in which a parent who knows that the needs of his children will partially be met by the food supplied by an Education Authority may for that reason contemplate their fate when abandoned by him with less apprehension. At most, however, such cases constitute only 10 per cent. of those on the table, and the wisdom of withholding assistance from the remaining 90 per cent. merely in order to bring pressure upon this small fraction of all the families concerned is, to put the matter at the lowest, highly questionable. Moreover, even assuming that children who are neglected by their parents should be made to suffer in order to teach the latter a moral lesson, what probability is there that the lesson will be appreciated? In those families where a father is contemplating the desertion of his home, family relationships must obviously be weak and unstable. Is it seriously suggested that the mere fact that a public body is known to provide meals for children in attendance at school is sufficient to tilt the scale; that a man who is willing, ex hypothesi, to contemplate relinquishing his wife and younger children to the Poor Law will be deterred from leaving them merely by anxiety as to how the children of school age will obtain their midday meal; and that, when his apprehensions upon this point are removed, he will hasten to avail himself of his freedom in order to abandon them to much more serious evils than the loss of one meal per day? Such a suggestion carries its refutation on its face. When family life has been so disintegrated that a man is contemplating the desertion of his wife and children, he is not likely either to be encouraged to do so by the mere fact that meals for school children are provided by a public body, or deterred from doing so by the fact that they are not. And a similar answer may be made to those who argue that "the result of feeding children at school is merely to encourage their parents to spend more upon drink." No one, of course, would deny that, if a man has already formed the habit of indulging his tastes without regard to the consequences, an increase in his means will enable him to spend more upon such indulgence. But that is a very different thing from accepting the implication that every accession in the income of a class merely leads it to fresh extravagance. The evidence, indeed, points in the opposite direction. During the last forty years there has been a great extension of public provision and a rise in money wages. Yet it is a matter of common knowledge that the consumption of alcoholic liquor per head of population has diminished and is still diminishing.

In reality, however, the idea that any large number of parents misuse the public provision of meals appears to be quite without any solid foundation, and to be a hasty generalisation from exceptional cases, which, because they are exceptional, are recorded by charitable persons with pious horror, and are given an undeserved and misleading notoriety. Almost all the actual evidence available points in the opposite direction. Again and again has it been stated to us that parents withdraw their children from the school meals as soon as an improvement in their circumstances enables them to provide food at home.^[533] Indeed, it is often said that they withdraw them before they can properly afford to do so, and before the Canteen Committee thinks it wise for the school meals to be stopped, while many refrain from applying for meals until they are driven to do so by actual necessity. The truth is that behind the talk on parental responsibility which finds favour in certain sections of society—especially those where it is customary for parents to pay for their children to be fed at school during 30 to 40 weeks of the year—there is a considerable amount not only of ignorance but of hypocrisy. These critics are apt entirely to overlook the fact that during the last hundred years parental responsibilities, so far from being diminished, have been multiplied by the State. Middle-class parliaments have insisted that working-class parents should send their children to school, should dispense with the help of their earnings, should provide them with food, clothing and medical aid. More important, they forget that to insist on "responsibility" is meaningless unless the means of discharging it are available; for one cannot blame a man for failing to do what he wishes to do, but which he is prevented from doing by force majeure. Now this is precisely the position of the majority of such parents as are aided by school meals. They did not fix the wages of adult men at 18s. a week; they did not ordain that employment at the ports of London and Liverpool and Glasgow, and in a score of other trades, should be a gamble. They did not decree that those who direct industry should at intervals of five to seven years find it convenient to curtail production and turn their employees on to the streets. They are born into a world where this is the established social order, an order which, as individuals, they are impotent to alter. If some of them occasionally give up a struggle which must often seem hopeless, at whose door does the blood of these men and their children lie? If it is desired that every man should regularly provide the whole maintenance of his family, then industry must be organised in such a way as to make it possible. Till that is done, to blame working people for acquiescing in circumstances which they did not create and which they detest is not only cruel but absurd. When every competent worker is secured regular employment and a living wage, it may be desirable that forms of public provision which exist at present should cease—though, even so, it is possible that the educational value of school meals will lead to their being continued. Till that happy condition is brought about they must be not only continued, but extended and improved.