Following on these reports came a strenuous agitation in Parliament and in the country. The National Labour Conference on the State Maintenance of Children, held at the Guildhall in January, 1905, declared unanimously in favour of State Maintenance "as a necessary corollary of Universal Compulsory Education, and as a means of partially arresting that physical deterioration of the industrial population of this country, which is now generally recognised as a grave national danger. As a step towards such State Maintenance," the conference called upon the Government to introduce without further delay legislation enabling Local Authorities to provide meals for school children, the cost to be borne by the National Exchequer.[107] The National Union of Teachers, at a largely attended conference at Llandudno in the same year, were agreed as to the urgent need for legislation.[108]
Report of the National Labour Conference on the State Maintenance of Children, at the Guildhall, January 20, 1905, p. 25.
Report of Select Committee on Education (Provision of Meals) Bills (England and Scotland), 1906, Qs. 792, 924, 925. By a considerable majority the Conference defeated an amendment that the Board of Guardians should be substituted for the Local Education Authority as the authority for making the provision, but owing to a technical difficulty the main resolution was not put. See also the resolution passed at a conference of the School Attendance Officers' Association, quoted by Mr. Slack in the House of Commons (_Hansard_, April 18, 1905, 4th Series, Vol. 145, p. 533).
In Parliament the agitation was led by Mr. Claude Hay, Sir John Gorst and Dr. Macnamara. It was urged that a large part of the money spent on education was wasted. To teach children who were physically quite unfit to receive instruction, was, as Sir John Gorst pointed out, "the height of absurdity."[109] Thirty years' compulsory education had, Mr. Claude Hay declared, resulted in disappointment. "The gain in intelligence was, to say the least of it, equivocal, while the physical deterioration of the people was obvious. The reason was largely that we had taken education as an isolated factor, whereas it was part of an absolutely indivisible unit.... We had assumed that ... the intellect could act independently of all other parts of the total human being. We had ignored the body, the soul and the will, and the result had been a fiasco."[110] Compulsory education involved free meals, but only for the "necessitous child."[111] It was declared that many parents would gladly pay if they were thereby assured that their children were adequately and properly fed.[112]