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If the children are fed at school it enables the mother to go out to work. The supply of female labour is thus increased, and married women can offer their work at lower wages than widows or single ones, because their labour is only supplementary to that of their husbands. The consequence is that wages go down, because more women are in the labour market than are needed, and those get the work who will take it for the least remuneration. Thus, though Mrs. Harris may get work, her children being ‘now fed by the ladies round at the school,’ she does so at the expense of lowering Jane Metcalf’s wages; and, as Jane is working to help her widowed mother to keep the four younger children off the parish, the only result is that Tommie and Lizzie and the two baby Metcalfs get worse food, and Jane finds life harder, and sometimes sees temptation through magnifying-glasses.

Besides these economic results which must inevitably follow the plan of feeding the children on any large scale, there are others which ensue from the lightening of parental responsibility, and these everyone who knows the poor can foresee without the gift of prophecy; the idle father is made more idle, the gossiping mother less controlled, and from the drunken parent is taken the last feeble bond which binds him to sobriety and its hopeful consequences. But perhaps as important as any of these results is the evil which follows the taking the children from the home influence. In our English love of home is one of our hopes for the future; and not the least conspicuous as a moral training-ground is the family dinner-table. There the mother can teach the little lessons of good manners and neat ways, and the larger truths of unselfishness and thoughtfulness. There the whole family can meet, and from the talks over meals, during the time which, as things now are, is perhaps the only leisure of the busy mechanic, may grow that sympathy between the older and younger people which must refresh and gladden both. No; it is not by any charitable effort that this poverty must be fought. A national want must be met by a national effort, and the thought of the political economist, which has hitherto been devoted to the question of production and accumulation of wealth, must now turn its attention to the problem of its right use and distribution, recognising that ‘the wise use of wealth in developing a complete human life is of incomparably the greater moment both to men and nations.’ While more than half the English people are unable to live their best life or reach their true standard of humanity, it is useless to congratulate ourselves on our national supremacy or class our nation as wealthy.