The arguments seem to us overwhelmingly in favour of dinner. The provision of a midday meal may possibly encourage mothers to go out to work, though it is exceedingly difficult to trace such a result to any great extent. But on the other hand there are numbers of cases already where the mothers are forced, by stress of circumstances, to be the breadwinners and are obliged to leave home all day, or, if they come home for the dinner hour, have no time to prepare a proper meal. The children will either get a piece of bread, or will be given coppers to buy their own dinner; in either case the meal will be equally unsatisfactory. Possibly the children will go dinnerless altogether, and the afternoon's lessons will then be a serious tax on their brains. The attendance at breakfasts is always less than at dinner.[231] The breakfast acts, that is to say, as a successful "test." But this means that many children, either because their mothers are too lazy to get them dressed early, or because they are too lazy themselves, miss the meals, _though they are admittedly in need of them_. Footnote 231: At West Ham, for instance, where all the children on the feeding list receive both breakfast and dinner, the number of breakfasts given during the year 1911-12 was 247,233, and the number of dinners 273,894; the attendance at breakfast was thus only ninety per cent. of the attendance at dinner. (Report of the West Ham Education Committee for the year ended March 31, 1912, pp. 175-77.) We do not wish to under-estimate the importance of the moral aspect of the question. It is essential that co-operation on the part of the mother should be demanded. But the child's need must be the first consideration. The laziness of the children, be it noted, is frequently not entirely their own fault; the drowsiness in the morning may be due to the fact that they have slept all night in a crowded room and stuffy atmosphere. Till the deep-rooted objection to open windows at night can be overcome, this will continue to be the case. For this reason too, the children will often have little appetite for breakfast. Physiologically, again, dinner appears to be the better meal since it contains a greater quantity of the elements which are lacking in the ordinary home dietary of the child. Thus in the feeding experiment at Bradford in 1907,[232] the porridge breakfast, the most satisfactory kind of breakfast that can be supplied from the food value point of view, contained a proteid value of 19 grammes, and a fat value of 20 grammes. The dinners contained, on an average, 29 grammes of proteid and 18 grammes of fat. Thus the combined proteid and fat value of the breakfasts and dinners was respectively 39 and 47 grammes.[233] Moreover, the gain in point of cheapness to be derived from provision on a large scale is much greater relatively in the case of dinners than in the case of breakfasts. Footnote 232: See post, pp. 184-6. Footnote 233: