POPPY DAY.

Shannon News, 24 April 1923, Page 4

POPPY DAY.

1041 EX-DIGGERS UNEMPLOYED

To-morrow, April 24, is Poppy Day, when poppies made by the children in the devastated areas of Franc \ will be on sale in Levin, and every other town and district of New Zealand -or the purpose, primarily, of helpi .g the children of those an as, and secondly of helping our own returned me n who are out of employment, of whom there are at present 1041. Of our duty to those in Northern France who bore the brunt of five years of fighting and whose country suffered correspondingly it is, unnecessary to speak. If they did not suffer for us, at least their suffering and their resistance enabled us to make our resistance effective and justice demands that we should acknowledge our debt. But, whatever our opinion on this point, on the question of cur duty' to our own men there can be no division of sentiment, and this applies particularly to those men for whom t(toe88 funds will be particularly used, whose wounds or other disability arising from the war, prevent them competing on an equal footing with more fortunate men. These arc the- meq of whom it is said:

“Back from the place where'the soil is red, And the earth is tom and bare; Where the sleeping forms of the nappy dead Are free from cankering care. Better their lot than the man’s who returns Broken and worn from the war.”

These are the men whose 'utureb form a perpetual debt against “he community, and a perpetual problem, and the R.S.A. which is, of all l>odies in closest contact with the ineviUhle aftermath of war is making these men its special care this year. As nut year, when a sum of £4749* 14s was raised in the southern half of the North Island, and ai total of £3270 was available after the third allocated to France had been forwarded, the money will be spent through the medium of the different local bodies, and it i.s hoped, subsidised £1 'dr, £l. When the scheme was inaugurated xne general conditions laid down by the District Committee for the administration of the funds were: (a) That they be spent on wages to unemployed returned soldiers throughout the district in works of a productive nature; (h) that preference be given to, ti e most necessitous cases, with first t reference to married men, then dngie men with dependents; (c) that the fund he spent through local folias and semi-public institutions which would subsidise the funds collected, and that it he spent upon works of a public nature; and 7T) that the standard‘rate of wages be paid. The last clause applies particulirly t,o the object which the R.S.A. has in mind more particularly this -ear, namely, that where men through incapacity are unable to earn a. "u-1 wage, their earnings be subsidised from the Poppy Fundi as far as mis will allow.

This year only half the number of poppies received last year were sent out from France, so that for this district there will only be 900 available, instead of the 1700 of last year, and these will be divided according to quota of population between the different schools in the district, and will be offered for sale, as is fitting, by school-children to help their less fortunate fellows in France, and the men whose sacrifices in the late war have, possibly, saved a recurrence of the unpleasantness of war during the lifetimes of tbe sellers. These poppies are emblematic of those others of which it is said:

Mm Flanders fields, the poppies grow Between the crosses, row on row.”

And everyone who purchases a poppy will have the assurance that he is doing something towards the work for which those sleepers died.