Chapter IV. The Extent and Causes of Malnutrition 170 Chapter V. The Effect of School Meals on the Children 184 Chapter VI. The Effect on the Parents 202 Chapter VII. Conclusions 219 Appendix I.--Examples of Menus 231 Appendix II.--The Provision of Meals in Scotland 237 Appendix III.--The Provision of Meals Abroad 249 Introduction The Provision of Meals for School Children, which is the subject of the following pages, is still undergoing that process of tentative transformation from a private charity to a public service by which we are accustomed to disguise the assumption of new responsibilities by the State. Begun in the 'sixties of the nineteenth century as a form of philanthropic effort, and denounced from time to time as socialistic and subversive of family life, it first attracted serious public attention when the South African war made the physical defects caused by starvation, which had been regarded with tolerance in citizens, appear intolerable in soldiers, and was canvassed at some length in the well-known reports of the Royal Commission on Physical Training in Scotland and of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration. The first disposition of the authorities was, as usual, to recur to that maid-of-all-work, the Poor Law, and in April, 1905, the Relief (School Children) Order empowered the Guardians to grant relief to the child of an able-bodied man without requiring him to enter the workhouse or to perform the outdoor labour test, provided that they took steps to recover the cost. The Guardians, however, perhaps happily, had little sympathy for this deviation from the principle of deterrence, with the result that the new Order was in most places either not applied or applied with insignificant results. The consequence was that the attempt to make the provision of meals for school children part of the Poor Law was abandoned. In 1906 the Education (Provision of Meals) Act was passed empowering Local Education Authorities to provide food, either in co-operation with voluntary agencies or out of public funds, up to the limit of a half-penny rate. In the year 1911-12, out of 322 authorities, 131 were returned as making some provision for the feeding of school children.