It is often argued, however, that the public provision of assistance is itself one cause of the distress which it is designed to relieve, because it must necessarily exercise a deteriorating influence over industrial conditions. The knowledge that his children will be fed is likely, it is said, to lead a man to relax the demands which he makes on his employer. The knowledge that he need not offer a subsistence wage for a family leads the employer to offer worse terms to his employees, more irregular employment or lower rates of wages, with the result that the ratepayer relieves the employer of part of his wage bill. Cut off all public assistance, and "economic conditions will adjust themselves to the change." Now it is perfectly true that the need which prompts the provision of school meals does normally arise from bad industrial conditions, and that to allow those conditions to continue while merely mitigating their effects is an offence against morality and an outrage on commonsense. Whether school meals are desirable or not for their own sake, it is the right of the worker that industry should be organised in such a way that he should be able to provide for his children in the manner which he thinks best, and that he should not be compelled (as he often is at present) to choose between seeing them fed at school and seeing them half-starved at home. But the theory which we have stated goes much further than this. It holds that public provision is a _cause_ of bad industrial conditions, and that the mere abolition of public provision would _in itself_ result in those conditions being improved. It is obvious that, as far as certain economic evils are concerned, this doctrine does not hold good. Many children are underfed because their parents are suffering from sickness or accident incurred in the course of their employment. Clearly an employer will not be induced to render his processes safe merely by the fact that his employees' children will suffer if they are unsafe. Many children are underfed because their parents are casually employed or altogether unemployed. Equally clearly there is no reason whatever to suppose that casual labour would cease because of their starvation; for if that were the case it would have ceased long ago. Nor again does the more specious doctrine that the wages of men are lowered by the provision of food for their children rest upon a securer foundation. In the nature of things it can neither be verified nor disproved by an appeal to facts; for the controversy is not concerning facts but concerning their interpretation. If we point out that in Bradford, when the Education (Provision of Meals) Act was first adopted in 1907, the majority of children fed were children of woolcombers, dyers' labourers, carters and builders' labourers, and that since 1907 the first three classes of workers have all received advances of wages, it may, of course, be answered that the advance would have