What are we to do with the great masses of unskilled, unorganised labour in our big towns? That is the question which intelligent thinkers are now asking themselves; and, as Carlyle said “England will answer it, or on the whole England will perish.” We have drained our country side and destroyed our agriculture to a great extent deliberately in order to obtain this vast city proletariat. Its condition is appalling; it is starved at school, over-worked when it is just growing into manhood, and afterwards drifts into the ghastly back-waters of our towns, now sweated, now unemployed, always an open sore, a contamination, a menace to our national life. That is what fifty years of applied Liberalism have made of about a third of the English people. Well, the first thing we must do is to try to save the next generation if we cannot save this one. The child at any rate must be protected. One of the first and most urgent of the social reforms needed is the feeding of children in public elementary schools. To teach unfed or underfed children is a sheer piece of profitless brutality. Compulsory and free feeding is as necessary to us as compulsory and free teaching--more necessary in fact for more could in the long run be made of an ignorant people that was fit and healthy physically than of a race of white-faced cripples, whom society had crammed with book-learning to satisfy its theories as barbarously as it crams geese with food to satisfy its palate. We are entitled therefore to demand the free feeding of all children attending Public Elementary Schools. Of course all sorts of less drastic proposals will be made--proposals for feeding destitute children only, or for making a charge, or for recovering the cost of the meals from the parents. Some of these proposals will be better than others, and we must take the best we can get. But none of them will solve the problem. Nor will the problem be solved by any merely permissive legislation, giving local authorities the _power_ to feed children without compelling them to use it. A local authority has no more right to underfeed its children than a parent has. All local authorities must be held responsible for the proper feeding of school children with their areas of administration, as they are already held responsible for their proper instruction.