CHILDREN'S DINNERS.
ON Wednesday, an important meeting was held at the Mansion House. The Lord Mayor was in the chair ; Mr. Diggle and Sir Richard Temple made speeches ; the Duke of Fife, the Lord President and the Vice-President of the Council, Mr. Mundella, Sir Lyon Playf air, and Sir Charles Russell would have come if they could, and did write to express sympathy. The object of the meeting was to assist the London School Dinners Association to provide cheap or free dinners to necessitous children attending the public elementary schools of London. Of the 750,000 children who come under this description, some 40,000, aacording to Sir Richard Temple, are in need of sustenance, and every penny subscribed (sees to feed the right mouth. Sir Lyon Playfair answers for the educational value of the dinners, since it is not possible to teach children who are starved. Object and machinery are alike good, and all that is wanted is liberal subscriptions from the , public to carry on the work of the Association. It was fortunate for the distinguished speakers and letter-writers that the meetine, was held on Wednesday. It is much easier and much pleasanter to give a capacious blessing and a small subscription to a charitable under- taking, than to defend it against grave and damaging criticism. Yet if the meeting had come a day later, this would have been the attitude which the speakers would have, had to assume. Rather more than a year ago, ,the Charity Organisation Society appointed a special-com- mittee to "inquire into the causes of distress in the cases of children thought to be in want of food." They chose five schools,—one in East London, two in South London, one in Central London, and one in North London. They obtained from the teachers lists of children either actually in receipt or apparently in need of food, and they then inquired thoroughly into the circumstances of each family. It is a significant fact that they found the work very much easier in the East London school than in the others, the reason being that in the East London school the system of feeding children was not in operation, whereas in the others "the meals were already in full swing." In the latter case, therefore, the parents, having got what they wanted, were naturally unwilling to have their need tested. When inquiry precedes relief, it is difficult wholly to withhold or disguise the truth. When relief precedes inquiry, it is plainly an object with the parent to say as little as possible. The most clearly proved destitution can get him nothing more than he has got already, while any failure to prove destitution may lead to a withdrawal of the free meal.
The committee have now presented their first report, and their conclusions go directly counter to those so easily formed and so glibly stated at the Mansion House meeting. First of all, they traverse Sir Richard Temple's dictum that every penny subscribed goes to feed the right mouth. A good many of the pennies in question un- doubtedly go to feed the wrong mouth. Where inquiry is defective or unskilled, this is inevitable. The child is put upon the list because its mother is a widow, or because it looks sickly. But the mother may not be a widow, or she may be in good work, or she may be helped by her relations ; while the child may be constitutionally delicate, or sickening for or recovering from some childish ailment. Out of 101 families whose circumstances were investigated by the comniittee—cases selected expressly on the ground of exceptional poverty-49 werefound not to require material assistance at all. The details of the cases are given in an appendix to the report. One of them is not at all typical, but it deserves quotation for its singular completeness. A boy is asked why he has not come to school the day before. He answers that his mother has not money to pay the fee. 'Thereupon the fee is remitted for thirteen weeks, and, inability to pay the school-fee being a, clear proof of poverty, the boy is placed on the free.dinnei list. When the committee make inquiries, the mother is quite frank about her circumstances. She has a weekly income of 17s. 6d., and the reason why the fee was not paid. was, that the boy, on receiving it to take to school, played truant and spent it. This is one of Sir Richard Temple's right mouths. There is another ease. A boy who is on the free list, though he shows no sign of insufficient nourishment, has a mother who is able and willing to provide him, with meals. But the boy prefers the free dinners, and as free dinners are going, the mother very naturally declines to interfere with his taste. In another case a child looked pale, and so was thought to be a proper object of charity. It then turned out that she was sickening for whooping-cough, and a little later the visitor finds her "rosy and fat," and the family "en- joying a good meal of meat and potatoes." Still, out of the 101 cases examined, there were 51 which did. need help of one kind or another. But in only five or six of these "could the temporary supply of meals to the children be regarded as an adequate remedy." In some cases; free dinners are a direct premium on vice and cruelty. What else can be said of a case in which the father can earn from ten shillings to twelve shillings a day, and eats eggs or meat or fish three times a day, but lets his children go without ? Every penny that goes into their mouths really goes into his, and the London School Dinners Association is really helping to feed this very well-to-do coalheaver. In other cases, again, an occasional free dinner does no appreciable good, as in one where a girl who ought to have gone into a hospital got one halfpenny meal a week. What is wanted is not less charity, but a different kind of eharity,—more thoughtful, more organised, more liberal, more far-reaching. The free dinners excite no gratitude and no shame. In many cases, the parents were actually offered help by the committee and declined it. They said they could get along quite well by themselves. So far, therefore, the system has not demoralised them. But if they will not accept help in one form, why are they so willing to accept it in another ? Because, say the committee, they do not realise that meals for their children are charity. They treat them as a right, "as in some way consequential upon the compulsory attendance of their children at school." Perhaps the danger of demoralisation is greatest where the school-managers try to make the system self-supporting. In one of the five schools a very vigorous effort was made in this direction. The theory was, that by providing a midday meal for the children, the parents' convenience would be consulted ; and with this view the managers "induced respectable, well-to- do parents, who were perfectly able and willing to provide for their children otherwise, to patronise the dipners on a pay system, and in this way to balance the loss on free meals." The result was many promises and little perform- ance. The demoralisation extended from the needy to the well-to-do parents, and children who would never have got upon the free list were placed upon a paying list, in which the payments were for the most part left to imagination.
Another fact which points to the same conclusion, and yet is constantly forgotten, is that the moral preven- tives of poverty are weakened by lax Poor-Law administra- tion. Poverty and improvidence are greatest where there is most outdoor relief, and the arguments for and against free dinners are pretty much identical with those for and against outdoor relief. Both have a semblance of charity and consideration which is not borne out by their prac- tical working. Both lead to deception and concealment of various kinds. Both encourage families to be content with occasional instead of regular work, in the hope that, either from the Guardians or from the school-managers, or from both, they will get enough help to eke out such money as they can earn by odd jobs. Both tend to lull charitable people into the comfortable but lazy conviction that there is no need for any more careful and systematic charity than there is at present. In one case in North London, the child was on the free-dinner list, the father was receiving nioney from his club, and the parish was allowing medical attendance and outdoor relief in kind. Evidently thought and arrangement which might have been better bestowed, must have been required to prevent these facts from becoming known in the wrong quarters. The very "Truant School," which was devised to act as a deterrent alike to parents and children, has in some cases an exactly opposite influence, at all events upon parents. Of one boy we read that the School Board visitor " thought that the mother could make him attend school if she liked, and that she wanted to get him off her hands." Every step we make towards indiscriminate because uninformed and uncalculating charity, does something to weaken self- dependence in those who are at once their own victims and ours. The best advice we can give our readers in regard to the London School Dinners Association is, to keep their money for worthier objects.
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