In spite of conflicting opinions, one point became increasingly clear. Whether the amount of mental strain necessitated by the Educational Code was exaggerated or not, there was no doubt that good educational results were dependent upon health and could not be attained where the children were seriously underfed. The situation was summed up by Mr. Sydney Buxton during a conference of Managers and Teachers of London Board Schools in 1884. The School Boards, he said, had by their compulsory powers been "year by year tapping a lower stratum of society, bringing to light the distress, destitution and underfeeding which formerly had escaped their notice. The cry of over-pressure had drawn public attention to the children attending elementary schools, and he thought it was now becoming more and more recognised that 'over-pressure' in a very large number of cases was only another word for 'underfeeding.'"[25] Footnote 25: _School Board Chronicle_, December 13, 1884, pp. 628-9. The principle that compulsory education involved some provision of food being thus generally admitted,[26] the question remained how was this to be done? Should the meals be provided free or should they be self-supporting? A keen controversy ensued as to the merits of penny dinners. _The Times_ quoted with apparent astonishment and alarm the view of the Minister of Education that it would not be enough to provide meals for those who could pay for them, and that whatever might be the vices of the parents the children ought not to suffer.[27] The Charity Organisation Society held more than one conference on the subject and emphatically contended that the only means of avoiding "pauperisation" was to insist on payment for the meals. Indeed some members felt so strongly that penny dinners were bound to be converted into halfpenny or free dinners, that they were reluctant to give the movement any support at all.[28] The attitude of the society was, as _The Times_ said, "one of watchful criticism."[29] Yet there were some, at any rate, who recognised that the obligation on the part of the parent to send his children to school involved a very real pecuniary sacrifice which might often more than counterbalance any advantage to be obtained from free meals. "We must not teach poor children or poor parents to lean upon charity," says the School Board Chronicle in 1884. "But, on the other hand, it ought never to be forgotten that this new law of compulsory attendance at school, in the making whereof the poorest classes of the people had no hand whatever, exacts greater sacrifices from that class than from any other. We hear a good deal sometimes ... of the grumbling of the ratepayers ... as to the burden of the school rate.... But do these grumblers ever reflect that the very poor of whom we are speaking never asked to have education provided for their children, never wanted it, have practically nothing to gain by it and much to lose, and that