THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, JULY 23, 1906. MEALS FOR SCHOOL CHILDREN

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13236, 23 July 1906, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, JULY 23, 1906. MEALS FOR SCHOOL CHILDREN

The suggestion of the Select Committee of the House of Commons set up on the Meals for Scholars Bill, that a special ra-le should be levied for the specified purpose of feeding children in the State schools, is of much deeper economic significance than at first sight' may appear. It has become customary to classify all such extensions of State action as " Socialistic" and to approve or regret them according as we regard sympathetically or : inimically the modern movement towards collectivism. But;a moment's ':; consideration : must convince everybody that in a Christian State the feeding of starving children is not and cannot be, in itself, a cause of political differences. By common consent it has been long agreed among all humane men and women that the protection of those who, by reason of their own weakness, are unable ■to protect themselves is the duty of both the private individual. and of the civic organisation. In the" United Kingdom yafet sums are annually raised",' by voluntary subscriptions as well as by the local authorities, in 1 the earnest endeavour to obey those maxims. which are woven into the web and.woof of Christianity. At this, distance ..'we are apt to hear much more of the noisy show of modern millionairedom than of the quiet charity of the British millions. Yet when we think of it we all know that the United Kingdom i 3 covered with great, hospitals which have never received one penny from the rates, with great orphanages . from, whose doors no homeless child is ever turned away, and which depend entirely upon freewill gifts, and with a thousand other charities whose united purpose is to lessen human suffering and to lighten social ills. No country in the world subscribes to deserving, and sometimes to undeserving, charities with anything like the free-handedness of the Mother Country, where millions of unpretending people count such gifts/as a normal part of their re-, gular expenditures. We have to remember this feature of British social life, and then to remember that for years public attention ..has been directed to the malnutrition of many thousands of the children whom compulsory education has forced into the schools, in order to realise the meaning of th» Select Committee's suggestion. It is a recognition by the Liberal majority of the appalling fact that in spite of the national generosity towards deserving charities it has been found impossible for private charity to feed all starving English school-children. This has long been acknowledged by those" personally acquainted, with the conditions of the British* poor, but ■ ijts formal and , official acknowledgment is another matter. From the days when the , British Free Trade parity opposed the exclusion from mills Of , children under eight years of age!— as a mistaken interference with the law of supply and demand, which was conformed to only by buying in. the cheapest and selling in the dearest market—to the days when the same British Free Trade party proposes to feed hungry school children as a regular charge upon the ratepayers, is more than two generations. ,At that end of the period it was earnestly and honestly believed that "Free Trade" was all that was required to make the general economic conditions of society sound, and thatindividual effort could meet all exceptional cases. At this end of the period it is so manifest that "Free Trade" has failed to make sound economic conditions that the State must provide for the public feeding of children whose parents are.not able to give them bread. The Select Committee, by its suggestion, has struck another note in the knell of the British fiscal system as now established.

■While foreign goods have been pouring into England, while foreign rivals have been encroaching on the colonial markets, while the country population has been drifting into the towns, hunger has been 'the portion of multitudes, of English children. That American bread should be cheap and German glassware purchasable below cost, that ; Siberian fowls could be bought for a shilling, and-French feathers at prices that would not pay even the. East End,

. <iid -no good , to , tiiosa w"ho >'found themselves unemployed J or to those whose wages were cut- down by the competition of the hordes of foreigners who were/, flooded into England by the same ships as those -which swamped the Home market with foreign goods. While foolish j politicians still prated of " Free Trade blessings," and while foolish multitudes still thought, in their ! short-sightedness, that cheapness i was the first and the last of national f ideals; the . slums ; ; of English cities I swarmed with children who hardly knew what it was to have enough. In many cases they were hungry because of parental neglect and criminalityj but in■> the vast majority of cases they were hungry because hunger and despair was the common lot ' of the great number to whom the established economic - conditions refused regular work and a living wage. They /were hungry largely because German factories were full of British orders, and because alien immigrants undersold their parents in the British labour market itself. Private charity could not possibly cope with a state of affairs" which affected the national life to such an extent as to make-beggary the normal condition of families able and willing to work. The mad extravagances of .the over-moneyed few who habitually squander the' wealth which has accrued to them by lucky chances cannot be too severely criticised, but these' extravagances are modest economies compared with that maddest and most unpardonable f. of all extravagances, the squandering in idleness of human energies, the enforced waste of human labour. These hungry children, collected into schools by the operations of the Education ," Act, brought immediately under the notice of humane and intelligent, teachers, became admittedly one of the shameful sights of Christian England. Private charity grappled ( with the problem and found it, too much; then the Boards of Guardians attempted to deal with it and found their powers doubtful and their means insufficient; now there are apparently to bo special provisions made for the wholesale feeding of English children whose parents cannot feed them. There was no question as to the imperative duty of this being efficaciously done when once public attention was aroused; it simply could not be avoided, England being what England is, a country charitable to the core and generally conscious of the duty of men to their neighbours. For in many schools the great bulk of the children were so dull with long continued hunger that they could not remember an ordinary sentence and f were quite incapable of the simplest learning. They had no bread, in , a country of cheap bread, because those upon whom they depended could not obtain regular work at living wages. To imagine that the problem is ended by any such " socialistic" solution as the formal shifting of parental responsibility to the ratepayer is to mistake the whole drift of economic thought in the United Kingdom. , The ratepayers -will not accept this as a finality. They will inevitably be more favourably ; disposed to fiscal proposals which promise, by affording employment to British workmen, to enable all. industrious British workmen to support their.'own children.