STATE NURSERIES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19448, 6 November 1925, Page 8

STATE NURSERIES

HOMES FOR 1 ‘UNWANTED.’’ STRIKING CONDEMNATION. NEW ZEALAND CRITICISED. LONDON, Nov. 3. Striking statements are made by Miss Constance Clyde in an article in the Empire Review. She suggests that the peace-loving people of New Zealand are more naive and untrained chan the Britons, that they lose their love of personal freedom and submit tc a reversion to feudal control and inter ference which would not be tolerated in England where corrective organisations would apply restraint. Miss Clyde mentions the activities of the overgrown public service, and in this connection cites a proposal to compel unmarried mothers to hand over their offspring to State asylums. She suggests that New Zealand has not a native or alien race to do the servile work and therefore unconsciously wishes to breed its own race of serfs. The writer alludes to the number of national children kept as State slave.' and as mental defectives. She picks out the ease of a girl who allegedly bore a child and then was labelled mentally* below par and sent to an institution. Miss Clyde alleges that money due to this girl was never spent on her and that the girl now works hard felling trees. The writer states that there is a further instance of a return to the old barbarism in the Education Department’s proposal that illegal children should become its property, liable to be handed over to either parent or to a State institution.