_Ibid._, p. iii. Even when the dinners were paid for, the payment rarely covered the cost. The same want of success was reported in the provinces. At Birmingham the experiment of giving penny dinners failed completely, and the meals had to be given free. (Report of Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, 1904, Qs. 13238, 13240, evidence of Dr. Airy.) "The experience of all workers in this movement testifies," says Canon Moore Ede, "that the poorest of all--those who are least well nourished--are scarcely touched by the penny dinners." ("Cheap Meals for Poor School Children," by Rev. W. Moore Ede, in _Report of Conference on Education under Healthy Conditions at Manchester_, 1885, p. 81.) Footnote 59: London School Board, Report of Special Committee on Underfed Children, 1895, pp. iv., v. "Under the penny dinner system, we had to provide something to attract the children, as they would not come to the same meal every day and pay a penny for it; puddings and meat pies were provided and varied from day to day. Now they get soup." (_Ibid._, Appendix I., p. 39, evidence of Rev. R. Leach.) "The soup ... supplied by the National Food Association varies so very little from day to day that it is natural for the children to grow tired of it," (_Ibid._, p. 22, evidence of Mr. C. H. Heller.) Apart from the question of more efficient organisation, the recommendations of this committee were somewhat indefinite. They urged that, as a guide for future action, continuous records should be kept of all children fed.[60] On the adequacy of the existing voluntary organisations to cope with the distress the majority declined to commit themselves. The minority asserted emphatically that these charitable funds were amply sufficient. The Committee questioned how far the supply of food was the right way of dealing with distress. "Actual starvation," they said, "was undoubtedly at one time the chief evil to be feared by the poor. But now that rent in London is so high and food so cheap conditions have changed."[61] Other forms of help, they felt, were possibly more needed, _e.g._, medical advice and clothing. Indeed, during the last sixty years there had been such an improvement in the economic conditions of the working classes as had not been known at any other period of history. Comparisons between conditions obtaining at the beginning and at the end of the nineteenth century are to some extent vitiated by the fact that the former was a period of extraordinary social misery. Nevertheless, the improvement is striking. Sir Robert Giffen, speaking on "The Progress of the Working Classes in the Last Half Century," in November, 1883, showed that, while the wages of working men "have advanced, most articles he consumes have rather diminished in price, the change in wheat being especially remarkable, and significant of a complete revolution in the conditions of the masses. The increased price in the case of one or