SOCIAL JOTTINGS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIII, Issue 190, 12 August 1922, Page 24

SOCIAL JOTTINGS.

New Zealand women take far less interest in securing clean and attractive looking streets ilian do the American women. In America the women take a much broader and wider view of their duty as citizens. Their care to see that all is neat and clean does not end with their own garden walls and yard fences, but extends to the street outside. In America if the women are not able to rouse the authorities, they turn out and sweep, and shame the authorities into taking actioh. The contrast between the appearance of the streets where the householders take aa much interest in the outside piece of sward as they do in the lawn inside, is an object lesson. Some charming homes are quite spoiled in appearance by the condition of the streets just outside the fence. Surely it is worth white, and good Citizenship, to clean up that piece outside one's fence, if the local authorities neglect it. Many will argue that it would encourage municipal neglect, but that seems a poor argument, especially when the appearance of one's house is spoiled by an untidy approach. In America—and in Canada —Lady Astor has had the kind of phenomenal whirlwind success such as comes to few of the outstanding personalities of a generation, and even to them probably only two or three times in a lifetime. Wherever she has gone, from the first ■moment she stepped on to the quay at New York, she has been mobbed. A hundrrd reporters have been told off to follow her round l ; she has been interviewed by as many as 40 pressmen in a morning. Streets have been named after her. Her meetings have been so overcrowded that_ overflow meetings have invariably had to be held. She has had an amazing Press. America has pone mad over her. X is curious how very little of all this overwhelming reception we have heard about in . the English papers (states "Time and Tide"). Lady Astor has turned her success to good account. It is said site has done more for Anglo-American relations than any Other woman has ever been able to do. I But she has done more than this. For the moment she stands in' America as one who can do no wrong, Mid Bhe has Used this opportunity with courage. She! has deliberately broken through the kind of half-showed silence which over here obscures the question of the League of Nations. SV has told her audiences that to her this means a League of Peace, and she insists on speaking of it. Both the American public and the American Press have taken 'rom her what at this moment they would have taken from no one else. It is difficult to over-estimate the value of what she has done in bringing the League of Nations back intc the range of discussable politics.