The storm spread from Eggenburg to Vienna, where public opinion was strongly on the side of the officials and against their Chief. The Viennese professed themselves quite shocked at his meanness. Questions were asked in the Landtag. ‘Is Lower Austria so poor that she cannot buy shoes for her own adopted children?’ member after member demanded indignantly. Dr. Schöffel stood his ground firmly, however. That the experiment should be tried, he was determined; and for the children’s sake, not the rate-payers’. He was responsible for the children; it was his duty to see that the best that could be done for them should be done; and the best was not being done, he declared. When they arrived at Eggenburg they were almost all physically below the average of children of their age; they were lacking in stamina even when not tainted with disease. That in itself was bad, he maintained; but, what was worse, most of them were still below the average when they left. These children must each one of them, while at the Reformatory, be put on a par so far as in them lay with other children, he insisted. Otherwise they would later, when out in the world, be handicapped in the struggle for life, unable, therefore, to hold their own and earn their daily bread. It was, as he told me himself, for the express purpose of trying to put them physically on a par with other children, and thus give them a fair chance of making their way in the world, that he had determined they should go barefoot. Consumption is terribly prevalent among the very poor in Lower Austria, it must be remembered; and it was at that time very prevalent at Eggenburg. The doctors had long been insisting that the little inmates ought to live practically out of doors the whole year round, working on the land, tending cattle. Arrangements had already been made for them to do so, but a difficulty had arisen. Working on the land and tending cattle in deep snow meant wet feet, wet stockings as well as wet shoes; and that for many of them spelt disaster. Dr. Schöffel was convinced, however, that it was not the wet feet that did the harm, but the wet shoes and stockings; and many of the doctors whom he consulted agreed with him. It was with their warm approval that he had decided to banish stockings and shoes and leave feet to take care of themselves—to try the going-barefoot experiment, in fact.