HELP THE CHILDREN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 November 1938, Page 5

HELP THE CHILDREN

\ VICTIMS IN MANY COUNTRIES LEAGUE OF NATIONS UNION ACTIVITIES Referring last night to the past year’s work of the Masterton branch of the League of Nations Union, Mrs T. R. , Earner said that the adoption of a Russion boy by the branch had caused some comment. The only person who could escape criticism was the one who did nothing, and the same applied to societies. But the criticism afforded an opportunity of explaining the purpose of the Save the Children Fund under whose auspices the little boy had been chosen. This “Save the Children Fund” (England), was a founder member, amongst 40 other organisations, of the Save the Children International Union, with headquarters at Geneva. The union was a centre of information and a clearing house for inquiries from which assistance was sought by governments and official and voluntary organisations. It also organised, the International Child Welfare Conference, and supervised the International section of the Child Adoption Scheme under which children from Abyssinia, Palestine, Austria, Spain, China, Africa, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Turkey and many other countries had received assistance of all kinds. This had taken the form of supplies of milk and clothing, the setting up of hospitals, orphanages, and resident and day nursery schools. The little boy in question was the son of a refugee Russian priest, who had fled from the Soviet regime. The death of both father and mother in Poland had left their two little boys in desperate straits. They had been received practically naked into a Russian orphanage at Vilna, and the money forwarded would be used to provide one of them with necessary clothes and to contribute towards his upkeep. The president of the Save the Children Fund in England, said Mrs Barrel’, was the Rt Hon Lord Noel-Buxton. Speaking of this fund, which was administered in the spirit .of the Declaration of Geneva that succour foi the child in need was above and beyond all considerations of race, nationality and creed,” Lord Buxton said that it was this spirit that made it possible to feed, clothe and shelter at one and the same time Armenian refugee children, who had been orphaned by the Turks, and the children of the Turks themselves; to feed hundreds of thousands of the children of Soviet Russia, and the children of Russians still loyal to the old regime who had fled to alien lands. Its characteristic impartiality had been a great strength for good in the Spanish crisis, faced as it was with new problems arising from the development of bombing from the air, inflicting untold misery on its child population. The Save the Children Fund might be unique, he said, among British organisations in the universality of its programme, but the spirit behind it was the essence of the Christian Evangel itself. Concluding, Mrs Barrer, mentioned that the branch had amongst its other activities of an educational nature, sent £ 20 to Madame Chiang Kai-Shek s apneal £5 of which had been subscribed by the pupils of Solway College; and £5 was also sent to the local appeal for Spanish children. She asked for public support of the Branch both as to membership and finance.