teaching of housewifery and cookery in the schools, it would speedily raise the standard in the homes. There would be another advantage. Adequate rest after the meal could be insisted on, followed by healthy play in the open air in the playground instead of in stuffy rooms and backyards. In the rural districts, as we have already shown, it is imperative that dinner should be provided for all who want to stay. Numbers of children are unable to return home, and it is almost impossible for the parents to provide suitable cold food for them to take with them; even when they can go home to dinner they frequently have a long walk, with the consequence that the meal must be eaten hastily and the children hurry back to school immediately afterwards. Footnote 539: Report of Proceedings of University Extension Oxford Summer Meeting, 1913, p. 17. If general provision is made, ought the parents to be required to pay or should the meal be free to all? The first plan has much to recommend it and has been advocated in many quarters. At the recent conference at the Guildhall on School Feeding, for instance, there appeared to be a general agreement in favour of this course. The experience of the Special Schools for Defective Children, and some of the rural schools, where a midday meal or hot cocoa is provided, shows that numbers of parents are able to pay, and there does not appear to be much difficulty in collecting the payment.[540] And in the ordinary elementary schools, where little provision is made for paying cases, it would appear that there does exist a certain demand for such provision.[541] On the other hand, it must be admitted that it is a question whether any large number of parents would voluntarily pay for their children's meals when it was known that provision was made for all and that other children were receiving the meal free. The payment would have to be left to the parent's conscience, for any attempt to try to decide in which cases payment should be insisted on and in which it should be remitted would introduce again the evils of the present system, with its demoralising enquiry into the parents' circumstances--though in a somewhat mitigated form, since no distinction would be made between the paying and the non-paying children, and the latter would not be marked off as a separate class as at present. Another difficulty, though a minor one, would arise in the fixing of the price to be charged. In the more prosperous districts the dinner might be self-supporting, but in the poorest localities it would hardly be possible to charge an amount sufficient to cover the cost of the food. Footnote 540: See ante, pp. 120, 123-5, 155-6. Footnote 541: In the ordinary elementary schools in some of the Scottish towns, large numbers of children pay for the dinners. (See Appendix II., pp. 242, 245, 246.)