"IT IS FOR YOU."

Auckland Star, Volume LIV, Issue 123, 25 May 1923, Page 5

"IT IS FOR YOU."

'__. APPEAL TO WOMEN. FOR VOICE AXD INFLUENCE. IN CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP. (By Telegraph —Press Association.) CmiISTCHURCH, this day. In the course of an address at the Anglican Church Congress on "Christian Citizenship," Bishop Averill, ot" Auckland, said, "The women of Xew Zealand were the pioneers of the civil franchise of women. Your voices, your influence, your services are sorely needed to arouse your country to the danger of its diminishing birth rate. The safety of these far-off Dominions of the Southern iSeas depends upon filling the empty places, or nothing will save them from the envious eyes of more prolific nations. It rests with you to a large extent to insist that the valuable report on the prevalence of immorality and of venereal disease should be given effect to. It is for you to insist that no legalisation of vice shall disfigure our Statute Book. It is 'for you to protest far more vigorously than in the past against the degradation of your sex, in particular by our unchristian and ever-widening divorce laws. It is for you to raise the estimate of true manliness and insist that a man's character is of infinitely greater value than his possessions. Tt is for you to continue to agitate to raise the age of consent when a girl can legally fling away her moral character, and so save your erring sisters from themselves. It is for you to set your faces against fashionable and popular vices, and to be prepared for sacrifice and unpopularity."