FAMILY ALLOWANCES

Abstract

THE subject of family allowances—assistance given in cash rather than in kind, to meet the cost of maintaining children during the period of their dependency—bids fair to become a live political issue. It is now nearly twenty years since Miss Eleanor Rathbone's much-debated book, “The Disinherited Family”, was published, wherein she made a powerful and piquant plea for the introduction into Great Britain of some system of communal payment for the important task of rearing children. Other countries had seized the opportunity presented by the War of 1914–18 to slip in the thin edge of the wedge and the breach thus made was afterwards widened, but Great Britain allowed that chance to pass.