Now, it is apparent that on the lowest estimate and with all possible care and knowledge the daily necessary food of a working man, his wife, and eight children, cannot cost less than on an average 2s. 4d. a day, or 16s. 8d. a week. If he is in receipt of a regular wage of £1 a week, this leaves 3s. 4d. for rent, firing, clothing, and school fees. " It is not to be done ! " exclaims the impatient student. But it is done, and done by hundreds of thousands, and happy is the family who can depend upon a regular wage of £1 a week. How is it done, however? By starving. In Mrs. Barnett's pathetic words, " The children have to put up with less than they need; the mother goes without rather than let the children suffer, and thus the new baby is born weakly and half nourished; the children develop greediness in their never-satisfied and but partly-fed frames; and the father, too often insufficiently sustained, seeks alcohol, which, anyhow, seems to pick him up and hold him together; though his teetotal mates assure him it is only a delusion." Mrs. Barnett sums up the whole matter in these words, "While wages are at the present rate, the large mass of our people cannot get enough food to maintain them in robust health." The results are scrofula, consumption, skin diseases, the exhausting diseases of the bones from which the children of the poor suffer, and the want of power to recover from acute diseases; it is the poor and ill-fed that the epidemics of cholera and influenza sweep to their graves - a stunted and physically degenerate population.

The moral and mental results are that ill-nourished brains are incapable of sustained intellectual effort, or even of correct and consecutive thinking; and hence that degenerate morality and low cunning take the place of a robust conscience and trained intelligence; and it is partly thus that the "criminal classes" of our latter-day civilisation are produced. Mrs. Barnett, with her intimate knowledge of the lives of the poor of London, among whom she has lived for the past twenty-three years, also shows how, in the desperate struggle to obtain even an insufficient supply of food, no funds are left the working man with which to provide books, the means of culture, and the opportunities of social intercourse, all of which are as necessary for his mental health and development as food and drink are for his bodily welfare. Nothing is left, moreover, wherewith to purchase rest and peace by the seaside or in the country, and nothing to meet the severe tax of sickness or convalescence.

How this state of things is to be cured taxes the mind of the philanthropist, the economist, and the socialist; that it is intolerable there is no doubt. We have long been accustomed to boast of our wealth, and to be proud of our national resources; but the squandering of the rich, which is apparent to all, blinds our eyes to the wants of the poor, which are hidden. We forget, moreover, in calculating the national wealth, that the prosperity of a nation must not be estimated by the spending power of the rich, but by the purchasing power of the poor, and that as long as half our population cannot by any possible means obtain enough food with which to maintain health, disease, suffering, crime, and unrest will be the result.