And how do the rich look on these facts? ‘Well! nine shillings a week is very fair wage for an unskilled working woman,’ was the remark I heard after I had told these facts to mine host at a country house, where we were eating the usual regulation dinner--soup, fish, _entrée_, joint, game, sweets, and hot-house fruits, said with the complacency of satisfaction which follows a glass of good wine. ‘Yes, about the cost of your one dinner’s wine!’ replied one of the guests; but then he was probably one of those ill-balanced people who judge people by what they are rather than by what they have, and he may have thought that the sad, lone woman, with her noble virtues of industry, patience, and self-sacrificing love, had, despite her hard manners, more right to the good things of this world than the suave old man owning fourteen acres of lawn on which no children ever played, and stating, without shame, first, the fact that he used eighty-two tons of coal yearly to warm his own sitting-rooms, and then the opinion that 9_s._ a week was _fair_ wage on which to support a good woman and bring up two children. While this wage is considered a ‘fair wage,’ the children must remain half-nourished, and grow up incapable of honest toil and valuable effort. While this wage is accepted as a right and normal thing, it is useless to think that the nation will be guided through dangers by means of heavy subscriptions to schools, to hospitals, and sick-asylums. Robust health is impossible; so disease easily finds a home, and teachers vainly try to develop brains ill supplied with blood. By the doorway of semi-starvation disease is invited to enter and find a home among the masses of our wage-earning people. Before me are the dietary tables of the Whitechapel Workhouse--an institution which stands (thanks to the self-devotion of its able Clerk) high on the list for careful management and economical administration. There are congregated the aged and infirm paupers, and among them are some of Nature’s gentlefolk, the old and tired, who, having learnt a few of life’s greatest lessons in their long walk through life, ought to be giving them to the young and untried, instead of wearying out their last days in the dull monotony of a useless and regulated existence. Their dietary table allows them for breakfast and supper one pint of tea (made of one ounce to a gallon of water) and five ounces of bread and a tiny bit of butter. For dinner they have meat three times a week, pea-soup and bread twice, suet pudding once, and Irish stew on the other day. For the sake of comparison I will make a food table of this diet, based on the same calculations of food value as those that have been previously made for the family.