necessarily degrading; and that, finally, a special Act had to be passed in 1905 creating authorities to administer assistance for unemployed workmen whom public opinion would no longer allow to be left to the tender mercies of a deterrent policy of Poor Relief. That the same result would follow with even greater certainty were public bodies to decline to provide for necessitous school children is obvious, inasmuch as to the foolish sentimentality of the ordinary person the sufferings of childhood make a special appeal. Indeed it has followed already. In the days when Education Authorities had no power to spend public money on the provision of meals for school children, what happened was that the provision of meals was begun by private persons, and in the towns which have not put the Act of 1906 into force such private provision obtains at the present day. Such extra-legal intervention has all the disadvantages ascribed to the public provision of meals, for one can scarcely accept the extravagant contention that while soup supplied by an Education Authority pauperises, soup tickets supplied by a philanthropic society do not. And it has few of its advantages. For private philanthropy tends to be more irregular and arbitrary in its administration than most public authorities. Since it cannot cover the whole area of distress, its selection of children to be fed is more capricious; since its funds are raised by appeals _ad misericordiam_ they often fail when they are needed most; and when, as often happens, more than one agency enters the field, the result is overlapping and duplication. Nor will it seem a minor evil to those who care for the civic spirit that even the best-intentioned charity can never escape from the taint of patronage, can never be anything but a sop with which the rich relieve their consciences by ministering to the poor. The statement that the feeding of school children weakens parental responsibility presumably means that the provision of meals at school induces parents to neglect to provide meals themselves. When one turns from these general considerations to examine how far this result has actually occurred, one is faced with the task of sifting a few grains of fact from a multitude of impressions. The first and most essential preliminary to the formation of any reasonable judgment is to determine the circumstances of those families one or more of whose members are receiving meals at school; and in order to throw some light on this point we give, in the following table, such particulars from six areas as are available:--[531] Footnote 531: