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Quantity of Food Cost Carbon- aceous Nitro- genous Breakfast—Hominy, Milk, Sugar. s. d. oz. oz. 1½ lb. Hominy ¾ 17¼ 3¼ 3¼ pints Tinned Milk 3¼ 4½ 2¼ 6 oz. Sugar 1 4¼ — Dinner—Potato Soup and Apple-and-Sago Pudding. 5 lbs. Potatoes 3½ 17½ 2½ 1½ pint Tinned Milk 1½ 2¼ 1 3 oz. Rice ¾ 2¼ ¼ 3 oz. Dripping 1½ — 2½ lb. Apples 3¾ 5 1½ 6 oz. Sago ¾ 3¼ ¾ 6 oz. Sugar 1 4 — Tea—Fish and Bread. 2½ lb. Fish 7½ 1¼ 7½ 2 lb. Bread 3 18 3 1½ pint Tinned Milk 1½ 2¼ 1 3 oz. Sugar ½ 2 — Total 2 5 86 23½

Again, however, we have spent 2s.5d. on food, and even now have not got quite sufficient strength-giving or carbonaceous food.

An average of 2s.4d. spent daily on food makes a total of 16s.4d. at the week’s end, leaving the labourer earning his 1l. a week 3s.8d. with which to pay rent (and decent accommodation of two rooms in London cannot be had for less than 5s.6d. or 6s. a week); to obtain schooling and lighting; to buy coals, clothes, and boots; to bear the expense of breakages and necessary replacements; to subscribe to a club against sickness or death; and to meet the doctor’s bills for the children’s illnesses or the wife’s confinements. How is it possible? Can 3s.8d. do so much? No, it cannot; and so food is stinted. The children have to put up with less than they need; the mother ‘goes without sooner than let the children suffer,’ and thus the new baby is born weakly and but half-nourished; the children develop greediness in their never-satisfied and but partly fed frames; and the father, too often insufficiently sustained, seeks alcohol, which, anyhow, seems to ‘pick him up and hold him together,’ though his teetotal mates assure him it is only a delusion.