tea, which, as it is extremely sweet, it furnishes with sugar as well as with milk. Sometimes it is spread on the breakfast slice of bread instead of butter or jam. An inexperienced visitor probably suggests that it would make a good milk pudding, but is silenced by hearing that it would take half a tin to make one pudding, and then there is no richness in it. Some people have suggested skim milk as a way round this very terrible deprivation of the hard-working poor. But skim milk does not take the place of whole milk as a food for infants. Parents who are comfortably off would never dream of starving their infants upon it. Even supposing that the children of the poor could magically flourish upon skim milk alone, there is not enough of it on the market to allow its use to be regarded as a universal panacea for hungry babies. In fact, it is worth a moment’s speculation as to whether the whole milk-supply of England is sufficient to insure a quart a day to each English child under five years of age. It is more than likely that, unless the milk-supply were enormously increased, adults would have to go entirely without milk should the nation suddenly awake to its duty towards its children. The purpose of this book is not to inquire as to whether this mother or that mother might not do a little better than she does if she bought some skim milk, or trained her children to enjoy burned porridge. It is to inquire whether, under the same conditions and with the same means at their command, any body of men or women could efficiently and sufficiently lodge and feed the same number of children. A boys’ home which maintains some thirty children between the ages of six and fifteen feeds, clothes, and lodges, each boy on an average of 6s. a week. This does not sound an extravagant sum. It is the outcome of much study, great knowledge of the subject, and untiring zeal. The working man’s wife whose husband out of a 22s. or 23s. wage allows her 20s., and who has that convenient family of three children which is permitted by experts on the subject to be a becoming number in a working-class family, has only 4s. a head on which to feed, lodge, and clothe, the family. Milk depots have been in existence in Lambeth for some years, and have undoubtedly done splendid service to babies under one year of age whose mothers cannot nurse them, but can afford to pay the growing amount of 9d. to 3s. a week for their children. The milk has to be called for, which limits the area in which it can be supplied; but it is sent out in sealed vessels, and is mixed in the exact proportions suitable to the age of the infant. So, when it can be afforded, its results are excellent. Unfortunately, the nursing mother is not helped by this, and it is she who requires milk for the needs of the baby she is nursing. Moreover, the price is, in the case of the 20s. budget, quite out of the question should the children number more than one, or at the most two.