head of population has diminished and is still diminishing. In reality, however, the idea that any large number of parents misuse the public provision of meals appears to be quite without any solid foundation, and to be a hasty generalisation from exceptional cases, which, because they are exceptional, are recorded by charitable persons with pious horror, and are given an undeserved and misleading notoriety. Almost all the actual evidence available points in the opposite direction. Again and again has it been stated to us that parents withdraw their children from the school meals as soon as an improvement in their circumstances enables them to provide food at home.[533] Indeed, it is often said that they withdraw them before they can properly afford to do so, and before the Canteen Committee thinks it wise for the school meals to be stopped, while many refrain from applying for meals until they are driven to do so by actual necessity. The truth is that behind the talk on parental responsibility which finds favour in certain sections of society--especially those where it is customary for parents to pay for their children to be fed at school during 30 to 40 weeks of the year--there is a considerable amount not only of ignorance but of hypocrisy. These critics are apt entirely to overlook the fact that during the last hundred years parental responsibilities, so far from being diminished, have been multiplied by the State. Middle-class parliaments have insisted that working-class parents should send their children to school, should dispense with the help of their earnings, should provide them with food, clothing and medical aid. More important, they forget that to insist on "responsibility" is meaningless unless the means of discharging it are available; for one cannot blame a man for failing to do what he wishes to do, but which he is prevented from doing by _force majeure_. Now this is precisely the position of the majority of such parents as are aided by school meals. _They_ did not fix the wages of adult men at 18s. a week; _they_ did not ordain that employment at the ports of London and Liverpool and Glasgow, and in a score of other trades, should be a gamble. _They_ did not decree that those who direct industry should at intervals of five to seven years find it convenient to curtail production and turn their employees on to the streets. They are born into a world where this is the established social order, an order which, as individuals, they are impotent to alter. If some of them occasionally give up a struggle which must often seem hopeless, at whose door does the blood of these men and their children lie? If it is desired that every man should regularly provide the whole maintenance of his family, then industry must be organised in such a way as to make it possible. Till that is done, to blame working people for acquiescing in circumstances which they did not create and which they detest is not only cruel but absurd.