For Children

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 462, 30 April 1948, Page 5

For Children

‘VERY day next week, and for some weeks ahead, pro‘grammes will be interrupted to allow an appeal to be made to the people of New Zealand for food and clothes and shelter for child victims of the war. For reasons with which most people are familiar the appeal has come later to New Zealand than to some other countries, but if that means anything now it is only that we have had some weeks longer in which to brace ourselves for an effort worthy of our resources. If we are not the most fortunate community in the world to-day it is difficult to imagine what other country is more fortunate-better fed, better clothed, and even, all in all, better housed. We are in any case so much more comfortably housed than the parents of millions of children in Europe and Asia that comparison is just a mockery. Not one of us will go hungry this winter or short of warm clothes. No one will sleep out or, of necessity, sleep wet or dirty or cold, as tens of thousands have done during the winter from which the Northern Hemisphere is just emerging. The least fortunate of us has a dry home of some kind, and sufficient food of some kind before he goes to bed. So have all our children without exception. And in return for all this well-being we are asked to give the earnings of a single day — a fraction of one week’s wages or salary or profits-to help the United Nations to do the one job on which they still are united. It is true, and it is very good news, that New Zealand has decided not merely to send gifts to some of the distressed children of Britain, but to bring some shiploads of them here to share our plenty in perpetuity. No appeal is more certain of a prompt response than the ‘call for foster-parents for these , future New Zealand citizens. But if charity properly begins at home, it must not stop there when home is such a comfortable place as New Zealand is to-day and so large, a part of the world is a wilderness or a slum.