Potatoes are not an expensive item in the 20s. budget. They may cost 1s. 3d. a week in a family of ten persons, and 4d. a week in a family of three. But they are an invariable item. Greens may go, butter may go, meat may diminish almost to the vanishing-point, before potatoes are affected. When potatoes do not appear for dinner, their place will be taken by suet pudding, which will mean that there is no gravy or dripping to eat with them. Treacle, or—as the shop round the corner calls it—“golden syrup,” will probably be eaten with the pudding, and the two together will form a midday meal for the mother and children in a working man’s family. All these are good—bread, potatoes, suet pudding; but children need other food as well. First and foremost children need milk. All children need milk, not only infants in arms. When a mother weans her child, she ought to be able to give it plenty of milk or food made with milk. The writer well remembers a course of eloquent and striking lectures delivered by an able medical man to an audience of West-End charitable ladies. He ended his course by telling his audience that, if they wished to do good to the children of the poor, they would do more towards effecting their purpose if they were to walk through East End streets with placards bearing the legend “MILK is the proper food for infants,” than by taking any other action he could think of. His audience was deeply interested and utterly believing. The fact that the children of the poor never taste milk once they cease to be nursed by their mothers was well known to the lecturer through his hospital experience, and hence his earnest appeal to have the mothers of those children taught what was the proper food to give them. He was, however, wrong in his idea that poor women do not realize that milk is the proper food for infants. The reason why the infants do not get milk is the reason why they do not get good housing or comfortable clothing—it is too expensive. Milk costs the same, 4d. a quart, in Lambeth that it costs in Mayfair. A healthy child ought to be able to use a quart of milk a day, which means a weekly milk bill for that child of 2s. 4d.—quite an impossible amount when the food of the whole family may have to be supplied out of 8s. or 9s. a week. Even a pint a day means 1s. 2d. a week, so that is out of the question, though a pint a day would not suffice for a child of a year old, who would need his or her full share of potatoes and gravy and bread as well. As it is, the only milk the children of the labourer get is the separated tinned milk, sold in 1d., 2d., 3d., and 4d. tins, according to size. These tins bear upon them in large red letters the legend, “This milk is not recommended as food for infants.” The children do not get too much even of such milk. Families of ten persons would take two tins at 3½d. in the week. Families of five, six, or seven, would probably take one such tin. It is used to put in