CHINESE CHILDREN REFUGEES

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22465, 28 July 1938, Page 9

CHINESE CHILDREN REFUGEES

TO THE CSITOB OF THB PBES9. Sir, —The Society for the Protection of Women and Children held its annual street collection last week, to which the public gave generously. After listening to the broadcast address by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, appealing for help for refugee children of China, it seems to me that they might extend their sympathies, and collect for these homeless and terrorised victims. I wish all the women in New Zealand could see some pictures of groups of these children taken by a resident of Shanghai, some of them naked. It is summer there now but winter comes and such a cold one in many parts of China. There are many who cannot send pounds for the adoption ot a child, but shillings count up, and how we collected in war time! If China falls, she will become a huge factory of exploited Chinese labour. Perhaps the children are better dead than working 12 hours a day in Japanese-owned factories. They did this before the war, for a few dollars

a montU, and often for poor food only. No wonder Japan, as their Consul said in v his address to the Optimist Club in Wellington, had placed 80 per cent, of her investments there. If the military beast, armed with all the weapons of a perverted science, is not stayed, I shudder to think of what may come to our tenderly-nurtured little ones. Mussolini says: “We congratulate Japan. We understand perfectly the spirit that animates her.” Japan is not for us, the “Far East,” but the very near north.' I am afraid it is too late to say, “Women! Do not buy Japanese goods.” Boycotts should have been begun years ago, for any nation that goes mad with militarism should be completely isolated. We sent Japan scrap iron to produce her child-killing bombs. Now it is estimated that 26 tons of melted iron are sent from one factory in Yangtszetoi daily, melted from scrap iron from ruined buildings. But I am getting away from my subject of helping homeless little ones. Pearl Buck says in “An Open Letter to the Chinese People,” “Your houses are poor by some standards, and yet I khow for I have eaten and slept in them, they are real homes, full of gaiety and overflowing with children. Everyone works, and you all manage together. You live the life I admire above all others, frugal, cheerful, simple, and without self-consciousness. Therefore, when I think of what you are now undergoing, at the hands of militarist Japanese, my heart breaks with anger. For, of course, you cannot compete with them in this kind of war. You are utterly defenceless, and so, though millions of you have gone out to fight, knowing very well how defenceless you are. for the present the invaders prevail.”—Yours, etc., DAME DOB. July 25, 1938.