WOMEN’S INSTITUTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3995, 7 October 1930, Page 8

WOMEN’S INSTITUTES.

DOMINION CONFERENCE.

ADDRESS BY LORD BLEDISLOE. WELLINGTON, October 2.

“ The Women’s Institute movement, which was initiated in Canada several years before the war and in England during the war and which has since spread throughout the British Empire and into many foreign countries, is probably the greatest social and educational movement among countrywomen in the world’s history.” With these words the Governor-General (Lord Bledisloe) opened his address this morning to delegates to the first Dominion conference of women’s institutes in New Zealand.

His Excellency continued: “It has enabled women to discover their own potentialities through mutual intercourse, a free exchange of ideas, and the pooling of individual knowledge and experience. It is the most effective agency in the Empire to-day for the revival and vigorous promotion of that well-nigh lost virtue, thrift. To those needing human assistance there are three sources of supply—namely, self-help, mutual help, and public subsidy. The women’s institutes are preeminently agencies of mutual service, and through that invaluable medium are a most efficient and practical means of selfhelp. Doles from the public purse are calculated to destroy self-respect and eventually to produce a nation of mendicants. On the other hand, mutual help and selfhelp are solidly constructive factors both in building up a nation and in sustaining its inherent strength and virility, its capacity for sound expansion, and its confidence in its own future destiny. One trend, if unchecked, spells national decadence and humiliation; the other, if stimulated, spells national greatness and well-founded pride.”

Regarding charitable enterprise, his Excellency said that if righteousness exalted a nation nothing more surely and rapidly degraded it than a complacent drift into mendicancy or an avoidable acceptance of charity, whether from individuals or the State. The true aim of a women’s institute should be, not to dispense charity but to dispense with charity as an outcome of greater knowledge. After dealing with woman’s part in the advancement of national prosperity and the ■ activities of women’s institutes in England, Lord Bledisloe concluded: “If it •would be helpful as a spur to its development here, her Excellency and I will be pleased to provide annually for the next five years a prize of £5 for the best essay by a New Zealander on the best means of making women’s institutes of real benefit to the rural areas of New Zealand.”— (Applause.)