The Press Friday, July 12, 1929. The Plunket Society.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19669, 12 July 1929, Page 10

The Press Friday, July 12, 1929. The Plunket Society.

| It has been said before in The Press j that the Plunket Society has reached that perilous stage when all men speak well of it. It has not, however, said or done anything yet, or ceased to do anything, likely to make its admirers more restrained. The very worst thing the Christchurch Branch has done during the last twelve months has been to allow the public to give it a little less money than it has required. It has done more work and incurred more expense—especially by renting a room and increasing the salary of its nurses —and yet has been content to be supported on the old scale. As a result its operations for the year show a Blight debit, though the public, local and general, by which we mean the people of Canterbury and the Government, should never have allowed that to happen. The Society will have to be louder and more insistent in its demand for public support, not merely because, as the Mayor said last night, and as everybody knows, " miracles " are being worked in the Karitane "Home," but because a much bigger miracle is in progress, as a result of the Society's work, right through the community. It may still be true that " Mankind in the mas 3 are not inter- " ested in health," but it is not quite true that they do not value health and are not prepared to pay for it. Sir Truby Kyig will go on dreaming his dreams till every boy and girl up to five years of age has somehow eome under his influence. No one will be able to say exactly how it has been done, or who, at the last stages, did it. It will just have happened, and the public will be paying for it, and not asking why. No one can really doubt that something like this lies ahead of us, though the chief anxiety in Christchurch at the present time—the "one dominant "idea" it is called in the annual report —is to secure better accommodation for the nurses and the visiting mothers. Some quite obvious anxiety was shown by most of the speakers last night who referred to the Society's struggle to secure the old Chester Street Fire Station, but it is to be hoped that this anxiety is groundless. The Council freely offers the Station, and the Society, after the fullest consideration of all its advantages and disadvantages, is very eager to have it, so that anyone obstructing the Bill on which the Society's hopes are fixed takes a heavy responsibility. It is all very well to say that the Society deserves better accommodation, or to argue that the river-bank is too precious a public possession to be alienated even for this noble use. The truth is that on the one hand no better building is available, or is likely to be made available for an indefinite number of years, and on the otier hand that the Society does not propose to put another building on the river-bank but merely to occupy a building already there.