"Working-Class Households in Reading," by Professor A. L. Bowley, in _The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society_, June, 1913, p. 686. The minimum standard for food was computed by Mr. Rowntree, in 1901, as 3s. for an adult, and 2s. 3d. for a child. This standard has been raised by Professor Bowley to 3s. 6d. and 2s. 7d. respectively, since prices in Reading in 1912 were about sixteen per cent. higher than at York in 1901. The diet on which Mr. Rowntree based his computations was mainly vegetarian, and his minimum standard assumed a knowledge of food values and perfectly scientific expenditure. (_Ibid._, p. 684.) Taking a slightly different standard, Professor Bowley computes that "_more than half the working-class children of Reading, during some part of their first fourteen years, live in households where the standard of life in question is not attained_." (_Ibid._, p. 692.) Footnote 530: _Ibid._, p. 693. If the suggestion that the provision of meals is a _principal_ cause undermining parental responsibility is fantastic, is the suggestion that it must necessarily exercise _some_ influence in that direction better founded? We shall deal later with such facts as can be used to throw light on this question. But we may point out here that the idea underlying it usually derives part of its cogency in the minds of many of its supporters less from any concrete evidence than from an implicit assumption that there is a "natural" division of duties between public authorities and the individual citizen, and that any redistribution of them between these two parties, which removes one function from the latter to the former, must necessarily result in the undermining of character, the weakening of the incentive to self-maintenance, the decay of parental responsibility, in short, in all the phenomena of the process known as "pauperisation." Now we need scarcely point out that, stated in this crude form, the theory that every assumption of fresh responsibilities by public authorities results in the undermining of character has no foundation in the experience of mankind. It is, of course, quite true that any sudden removal from an individual of duties which he has hitherto been accustomed to discharge may result in weakening the springs of effort. It is also quite true that any sudden addition to his responsibilities may result in crushing them, and that, as far as the more poorly paid ranks of labour are concerned, energies are far more often worn out in a hopeless struggle than sapped by an insidious ease. But by themselves these facts prove nothing as to the _manner_ in which burdens, duties, responsibilities, should be distributed between the community and its individual members. What experience shows is that there is no "natural" allocation of functions, but that there has been throughout history at once a constant addition to, and a constant re-arrangement of them, and that the former process