The Waltham Orphanage

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 13, 29 March 1906, Page 1

The Waltham Orphanage

Few people lake kindly to leek or humble-pie. And it was hardly to be expected that the North Canterbury Charitable Aid Board would take -without a grimace* the bitter .posset administered to it' by the findings

of the Commission of Inqiuiry into the conduct of the Waltham Orphanage. By a narrow majority the Board resolved that certain findings of the Commissioner (Mr. H. W. Bishop, S.M.) ' are not borne out by the evidence adduced at the inquiry.' The Commissioner's report was referred by the Board to its Institutions Committee. But (says the ' Press ') 'it 'appears that the Committee did notj e\en go through the formality of discussing the report before arriving at their decision.' They seem to have followed the example of Jeremy Diddler and the King in Wonderland, by ' considering their verdict ' before they considered their evidence. And then the labored effort of the chairman Xo defend the Board, in eflect, for following a course with which he was in disagreement, and the dreary discussion that sprawls over four columns of the ' Press ' — ' Beaucoup de bruit, Peu de fruit ! ' — a half-acre of useless amd unprofitable words, words, words ! Says the ' Otago Daily Times ':— ' The members of the governing body would have better occupied their time if they had devoted their attention to the discussion and adoption of proposals for the better management of the institution in future, for such time as thoy shall ha\e control iof it, rather than to the effort to discredit the conclusions formed by the Commissioner after a patient and, we should judge, dispassionate investigation of the charges which were the subject of inquiry. It seems 'to us to be entirely idle for the Board to meet the findings of the Commissioner by a bald assertion, supported by a narrow majority cf the mrmihVrs, that in three points they are opposed to the weight of testimony. . . The Board really failed in its duty, which was, first of all, towards the children in the Orphanage, and it is to this failure that the unpleasantness which has occurred is directly traceable.' The majority of the Board can neither gain sympathy nor respect by quacking like angry ducks at the Commissioner. They might have commanded both had they proceeded to set tht-ir house in order, and tried to brighten the deadly and depressing monotony of the lives of the hapless orphans that were committed to their care. ' If every man would mend a man, Then all mankind were mended.' But the authors of abuses are not mended, nor are people commonly made wiser or better, by sitting still and scolding. There is more serious work to be done about Waltham than the devising of excuses and mere deprecatory tongue-clacking.