The State’s guarantee of the necessaries of life to every child could be fulfilled through various channels—some of them, as the feeding of school-children, already in existence. This is no suggestion for class differentiation. The scholars on the foundation of many of the great public schools, such as Eton and Winchester, are fed, as well as housed and educated, from the funds of old endowments. National school feeding, endowed from national wealth, would be an enlargement and amalgamation of systems already in being. There should be no such thing as an underfed school child: an underfed child is a disgrace and a danger to the State. The medical inspection of school-children, extended to children of all classes, should lead to a universal system of school clinics, where the children would not only be examined, but treated. Baby clinics should be within the reach of every mother, and should be centres where doctors and nurses, at intervals to be dictated by them, would weigh and examine every child born within their district. At this moment any weighing centre, school for mothers, or baby clinic which does exist is fighting the results of bad housing, insufficient food, and miserable clothing—evils which no medical treatment can cure. Such evils would be put an end to by the State grant. Nor would an intolerable system of inspection be necessary in order to see that the co-trustees of the State—the parents—should faithfully perform their part of the great work they are undertaking. At every baby clinic the compulsory attendances of a well-dressed, well-nourished, well-cared-for child would be marked as satisfactory. No inspection needed. An unsatisfactory child would perhaps be obliged to attend more often, or its condition might require the help and guidance of a health visitor in the home. In this way a merely less efficient home would easily be distinguished from one which was impossible. The somewhat inefficient home might be helped, improved, and kept together, while, if the home conditions were hopelessly bad, the public guardian would in the last resort exercise its power of making fresh provision for the ward of the nation in some better home. As things now are, we have machinery by which the State in its capacity of co-guardian coerces the parents and urges on them duties which, unaided, they cannot perform. Parents are to feed, clothe, and house their children decently, or they can be dealt with by law. But when, as a matter of fact, it is publicly demonstrated that millions of parents cannot do this, and that the children are neither fed, clothed, nor housed decently, the State, which is guardian-in-chief, finds it convenient to look the other way, shirking its own responsibility, but falling foul, in special instances, of parents who have failed to comply with the law.