Besant, Annie Wood: Wake up, India: a plea for social reform (Adyar, India , Krotona [i.e. Los Angeles], 1913)

there, we have what you find here in the Panchama
schools—a child occasionally fainting and falling off
the bench, fainting on the floor, and when you ask ;
" Why ? " the answer is : " No food, no breakfast."
And when on the London School Board I pleaded, with
one or two others, to give food at least to the children
whom we were educating—for the starved brain can-
not learn, and it is not fair to put upon the starved
frame of the child the extra burden of education—I
was told that to ask for that was to pauperise th&
people, as though you could pauperise people who had
no food to eat, not enough to enable them to go through
the lessons in the school. Now the children are fed.
Now public opinion is changed. Now in England the
public conscience is awake, and they are dealing
with these miserable conditions in their midst. You imi-
tate England in a good many things that you might
leave alone. Imitate her in this also, that her con-
science is awakening to the miseries of her people in
the slums, and that young men of wealth, young men
of position, young men of leisure, are to-day going
out among those miserable outcasts of London, and
are bringing them the rescue that you should bring
to your people here.

And so, if I speak of England and have spoken of it
for a moment, I do so that you may realise that in all
that I shall say to you now I am not blaming you
more than I should blame any other man, any other
country. I am not charging cruelty. It is indifference