IX
When all the evidence is piled up, we are irresistibly driven to the conclusion that no attempt to educate hungry, ill-fed children can be successful or ought to be attempted. Danton’s fine phrase rings eternally true, “After bread, education is the first need of a people.” That education is a social necessity is no longer seriously questioned. But the other idea of Danton’s saying, that education must come after bread,—that it is alike foolish and cruel to attempt to educate a hungry child,—is often lost sight of. In the early days of the public agitation for free and compulsory education, it was not infrequently urged that before the state should undertake to compel a child to attend its schools and receive its instruction, it ought to provide for the adequate feeding of the child. That argument, happily, did not prevent the establishment and development of public education, but now that the latter system has been firmly rooted in the soil of our social system, there is an increasing belief in the inherent wisdom and justice of the claim that the state has no right to attempt to educate an unfed or underfed child.[[172]]
There is something attractive about such elemental simplicity as that of the Czar who drew a straight line across the map from St. Petersburg to Moscow, when his counsellors asked him what course he wished a railroad between the two cities to follow, and said, “Let it be straight, like that.” I suppose that every worker for social improvement has felt oppressed at times by the complexity of our social problems, and wished that they could be solved in some such simple and direct manner. But social progress is not made along straight lines in general. What seems to the agitator axiomatic, simple, and easy, appears to the constructive statesman doubtful, complex, and difficult. There is at least one European municipality, however, which has solved this problem of the feeding of school children in a delightfully direct and simple way. The city of Vercelli, Italy, has made feeding as compulsory as education![[I]] Every child, rich or poor, is compelled to attend the school dinners provided by the municipality, just as it is compelled to attend the school lessons. Not only food, but medical care and attention, are provided for every child, as a right, on the principle that it is absurd and wrong to attempt to develop the mind of a child while neglecting its body. It is a mocking judgment of our civilization that such a natural, intelligent solution of a pressing problem should be impossible for our greatest and richest cities, though attained by a little Italian city like Vercelli.
I do not suppose that it will be found possible to apply such a principle generally until many years have passed and our social system has been modified considerably. In the meantime, some less thorough and comprehensive system, like that of the French Cantines Scolaires, for instance, will probably be adopted. It is not, however, my intention here to advocate any particular scheme. I can only reiterate that the feeding of school children is an imperative, urgent, and vital necessity, and emphasize certain principles. Elsewhere I have given a résumé of the methods adopted in several other countries,[[J]] and I need not, therefore, go over that ground. Whatever is done should be free from the taint of charity. There must be no resorting to the pernicious principle, sometimes advocated by our so-called “practical reformers,” of subsidizing charitable societies to undertake the work. There must be no discrimination against the child whose parents have failed to do their duty. The child of the inebriate, the idler, or the criminal must not be made to suffer for his parent’s sin. The state has no right to join with the sins of the fathers in a conspiracy to damn the children’s lives, and only a perverted sense of the relation of the child to the state could have made it possible for such a proposal to be made. Upon the principle that every child born into the world has a right to a full and free supply of the necessities of life during the whole period of its helplessness and training for the work of the world, so far as the resources of the world make that possible, the state should proceed until in all schools where children attend compulsorily, free, wholesome, and nutritious meals are provided for all children as a common right.
Of course, the cry will be raised that such a system would result in wholesale pauperization. I am not afraid of that cry—it has become too familiar. When I first went to school in the West of England, I used to carry my school fees—six cents a week—each Monday morning. Under that system it was necessary for the school authorities to employ officers to see that the fees were paid, and frequently defaulting parents were summoned. The children of poor parents were exempted from paying the school fees, but they had to present big cards to be marked by the teacher, and were thus made conspicuous. I remember very well that when it was proposed to make the schools free to all, the same bogey of pauperization was raised.[[173]] The school fees were abolished, however, and the objection was heard no more. In the early days of the Free Libraries movement, a similar outcry was heard, but one never hears it nowadays, nor does anybody consider that he is pauperized when he takes home a book from the city library to read. And so one might go on, through a long list of things which were opposed upon the same grounds by many earnest people, but are now commonly enjoyed. If, moreover, the alternative to pauperization is slow starvation and suffering, I unhesitatingly prefer pauperization.