carrying out this plan are similar in kind to those
formerly experienced in the recovery of unpaid school fees. The cost of
recovering is often greater than the expense involved, and as a
consequence local authorities are not inclined to prosecute. Further,
there is the difficulty of discriminating between underfeeding due to
wilful and culpable neglect and underfeeding due to the actual chronic
poverty of the parent. If this plan is to be effective, some simpler
method of recovery of cost than that which now prevails must be adopted.
_E.g._, it might be enacted that the sum decreed for should be deducted
from the weekly wages of the parent by his employer. Here again many
difficulties would present themselves in the carrying out of this plan.
In the case of certain employments this could not be done. In other
cases, employers would be unwilling to undertake the invidious task.
Moreover, the cost of collection might equal or be greater than the cost
incurred. Above all, such a method would do little to alleviate the
sufferings and better the nutrition of the child. In most cases the
school provides but one meal a day. Experience has shown that in the
case of children of the dissolute the free meal at the school means less
food at home. Were the cost deducted from the weekly wages of the
parent, the result would be intensified. So great have been the
difficulties felt in this matter that with one or two exceptions no
foreign country has made the attempt to recover the cost of feeding from
the parent. Yet the disease requires a remedy. The evil is too dangerous
to the future social welfare of the community to be allowed to go on
unchecked and unremedied. Moreover, to endeavour to educate the
persistently underfed children of our slums is to do them a twofold
injury. By the exercises of the school we use up, in many cases, with
little result, the small store of energy lodged in the brain and nervous
system of the child, and leave nothing either for the repair of the
nervous system or for the growth of his body generally. We prematurely
exhaust his nervous system, and by so doing we hinder his bodily growth
and development. To make matters worse, we often insist that the child
in order to aid his physical development must undergo an exhausting
system of physical exercises when what is most wanted for this purpose
is good and nourishing food and a sufficiency of sleep. At the same time
that we are neglecting the nutrition of h