An average of 2_s._ 4_d._ spent daily on food makes a total of 16_s._ 4_d._ at the week’s end, leaving the labourer earning his 1_l._ a week 3_s._ 8_d._ with which to pay rent (and decent accommodation of two rooms in London cannot be had for less than 5_s._ 6_d._ or 6_s._ 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 3_s._ 8_d._ 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. And this is no fancy picture. I have now in my mind one Wilkins, a steady, rough, honest, sober labourer, fairly intelligent, and the father of thirteen children. The two eldest, girls of fourteen and fifteen, are already out at service; but the eleven younger, being under age, are still kept at school and supported by their father. He earns 1_l._ regularly. They rent the whole house at 12_s._ a week, and, letting off part, stand themselves at a weekly rent of 5_s._ for three small rooms. Less than that, as the mother says, ‘I could not nohow do with, what with all the washing for such a heavy family, and bathing the little ones, and him coming home tired of an evening, and needing a place to sit down in.’ The wife is a decent body, but rough and uncultured; and as she is ignorant of the proper proportions of nitrogenous and carbonaceous substance necessary for the preservation of healthy life, as well as of the kinds of food in which they can be best found, she feeds her family even less nutritiously than she could do if she were better informed. Still the whole wage could only feed them if it were all expended ever so wisely, leaving no margin for the requirements already mentioned.