PRACTICAL PHILANTHROPHY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20039, 4 March 1927, Page 8

PRACTICAL PHILANTHROPHY.

The Patients and Prisoners’ Aid Society represents a philanthropic enterprise with which the entire community is in sympathy. It would be difficult to find a single person who does not cordially approve a humane endeavour which has the twofold aim of relieving misfortune and assisting those who have erred to regain the moral and material status of reputable citizenship. If the society could exist and flourish on good words and appreciative sentiment the task which it has in hand would be very easy and there would be no cause for the slightest degree of dissatisfaction or anxiety. But the prosperity of a benevolent agency of this kind is inevitably dependent on favourable conditions of finance. The active workers in such an excellent movement ought to be free from the invidious and hampering necessity of soliciting the monetary support without which the work cannot be properly carried out. There is no getting away from the fact that the people of Dunedin in general have never done their full duty by the society in the matter of financial aid. The work has been kept going for fifty years by the liberality of a comparatively small number cf conscientious citizens, and it was said only too truly at the annual meeting this week that the society had never had enough money to enable it to do all that it ought to do and wanted to do. It is obviously desirable that the coutributive system should be more broadly based, and that thousands, instead of hundreds, should cheerfully recognise their obligation to an undertaking which admittedly makes for the betterment of civic life. The society will celebrate its jubilee in four months’ time, and it is to be trusted that the occasion will be marked by an appropriate quickening of public interest. The value of the social work is likely to be enhanced by the fact that Mr Gumming, the devoted anjl highly capable agent, will be able in ruture to give his whole working time to the task. We heartily associate ourselves with the eulogistic references that have been made to Mr Gumming, as regards his fruitful activity both as probation officer and as agent of the Patients and Prisoners’ Aid Society.