hand, we do nothing, or if we look to the present voluntary agencies to
go on doing what they can to remedy the evil, what then? Will the evil
be lessened in the next generation? Assuredly not, if the experience of
the present and of the past are safe guides as to what we may expect in
the future.

Hence we have no hesitation in urging that the feeding of children
attending the Public Elementary Schools should be organised on lines
similar to the recommendations laid down in the _Special Report from the
Special Committee on Education_ (_Provision of Meals_) _Bill_, 1906.[22]

But if we carry out these recommendations and do nothing else, then it
may be that we shall partially remedy the evil in the next generation,
but we shall to a large extent perpetuate the present condition of
things. Side by side with this, we must institute and set other agencies
at work. By the institution of Free Kindergarten Schools in the poorer
districts of our large towns, by postponing the beginning of the formal
education of the child to a later age, by a scientific course of
physical education, by better trade and technical schools, and if need
be by the compulsory attendance of children at evening continuation
schools, we must bend our every effort to secure that the ranks of the
casual, the unskilled, and the unemployable shall be lessened, and the
ranks of the skilled and intelligent worker increased.

As the freeing of elementary education can be justified on the ground
that the education of the child is necessary for the future protection
of the State, so on similar grounds it may be urged that the nutrition
of the child is also necessary. Without this our merely educational
agencies can never adequately secure the social efficiency of the coming
generation. At the same time, unless in the future the need for free
education and free food becomes less and less, and unless by the means
sketched above we rear up a generation economically and morally
independent, then truly we have not discovered the method by which man
can be raised to independence and rationality.

APPENDIX

_Recommendations of the Select Committee on Education_ (_Provision of
Meals_) _Bill_, 1906.

"The evidence, verbal and documentary, placed before the Committee
has led them to arrive at the following general conclusions:--

"1. That it is expedient that the Local Education Authority should
be empowered to organise and direct the pro