N.Z. CRITICISED.

Hokitika Guardian, 10 February 1926, Page 3

N.Z. CRITICISED.

SIR JAMES ALT-EX REPLIES. * Australia A N.Z. Cable Association.] V . LONDON, Feb. 10. In tile current number of the “Empire Review” Sir James Allen (New Zealand High Commissioner) effectively traverses Constance Clyde’s statements. [Striking statements were made by Constance Clyde in an article in the Empire Review. She suggested that the space-loving people of New Zealand are more native and untrained than Britons, so that they lose their love of personal freedom, and submit to a reversion to feudal control and ' to interference which would not be tolerated in England, where corrective organisation would apply restraint. J Miss Clyde mentioned the activities of the overgrown public service, and in .this connection she cited a proposal to compel unmarried mothers to hand over their offspring to the State asylums. She suggested that New Zealand had not a native or an alien race 1 to do its service work. Therefore, New 1 Zealand unconsciously wishes to breed its own race of serfs. The writer alluded to a number of rational children lie- ' ing kept as State slaves and as mental defectives. She picked out the case ■ of a girl who allegedly bore a child and I then she was labelled as mentally be- 1 low par and sent to an institution. Miss Clyde alleged that the money '

due to this girl was never spent on her, and that the girl now works bard —felling trees. The writer stated that there was the further instance of a return in New Zealand to ohl barbarism in its Education Department’s new proposal that illegal children should become its property and lie liable to be banded over to either parent or to a State institution.]