NO NEED TO WORRY

Southland Times, Issue 20524, 28 June 1928, Page 7

NO NEED TO WORRY

NEW ZEALAND’S MORALITY. REPLY TO ARCHBISHOP AVERILL. (Per United Press Association.) Wellington, June 27. Archbishop Averill’s remarks on the morality of New Zealand were referred by the Hon. J. A. Young, Minister of Public Health, to Dr. Gray, head of the Mental Hospitals Department, for comment. The latter, in a memo to the Minister, says he has no exact knowledge of how New Zealand compares with other countries in regard to divorce, prison, population or illegitimate births, but if the accuracy of His Grace’s statement with regard to them may be gauged by his references to lunacy and suicides, New Zealanders may quite safely again turn their intention to butterfat and the All Blacks. It would appear that Archbishop Averill has drawn his facts from a pamphlet issued some time ago by Dr. Moore, of Dunedin, but this is such a jumble of misleading figures and futile and erroneous deductions from mis-state-ments that it is difficult to know how anyone with even a moderate knowledge of the situation could be so misled as to base upon them any authoritative message to the country. Dr. Gray then proceeds to quote some of Dr. Moore’s figures on lunacy and the rejection of recruits for the expeditionary forces and to show where they were wrong. He winds up by saying he has travelled over a large part of the globe and met many men of different races. In spite of all the Cassandras and dismal theorists he has no hesitation in affirming that the level of intelligence and standards of morality in this- country as compared with others are not such as to cause any measure of uneasiness.