Fifth annual Canadian conference on child welfare.

Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Fifth annual Canadian conference on child welfare. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/294 (page 10)
    PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS, 1925 The president opened the annual meeting, and in welcoming the Council members, spoke as follows:— It is my pleasant duty to-day to welcome you to the sixth annual meeting of the Council. I can assure you we are glad to see so many here taking such a keen interest, which promises well for a successful conference. It is rather late in the day, at the end of the year, to thank you for elect- ing me to the President’s chair. It has strengthened my faith in the old proverb, ‘“ Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” for at the time the honour was con- ferred upon me I was abroad. The first intimation I had of it, was when I met our secretary in London and, before I had time to decline, she said, “ l’Il stand behind you.” She has faithfully kept her promise. Such faith have I in her ability that my courage would lead me to even greater things if she promised “to stand behind me.” The work this year has been placed on a better financial basis than ever before through the untiring efforts of our Convener of Ways and Means Com- mittee, Dr. Helen Reid. Lists of names in each province were carefully pre- pared and personal letters to the number of over 500 have been sent out in order to provide an assured budget for three years. The work of the Council is being built up gradually and developed in many practical lines as opportunities offer. There seems to be no limit to the rami- fications of child welfare work. But our motive power is the strongest in the world, “ Love for children,” and it is universal. It is most gratifying to hear of the growing popularity and acceptance of the Children’s Charter. It calls for a high standard and an ideal, practical and appealing. On June 11 a public meeting of the National Council of Women of Great Britain was held in Central Hall, Westminster, when the president of _ thirty national organizations signed the Declaration of Geneva on behalf of her society. The League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and the Protection of Children met in Geneva from May 20 to 27, this being its first meeting since the protection of children was added to the committee’s objects. There are five assessors appointed for this special purpose, each repre- senting an international association or group of associations. At once difficul- ties made themselves felt, arising from the union of two quite dissimilar objects under the same committee. Each group of assessors, though permitted to attend all meetings, could only take part in their own section of, the two-fold object, and there was some dissatisfaction with the waste of time which thereby resulted. Objections were also taken to the linking up of so specialized and painful a question as the traffic in women with the great constructive subject of child wel- fare. Some members urged strongly that the Council of the League should be asked to dissolve this unnatural union by forming two separate committees. But for various administrative reasons the solution finally reached was that the committee should be renamed as the “Advisory Commission for the protection and welfare of children and young people”; that it should consist of two com- mittees, one called the “Traffic in Women and Children Committee” the other “The Child Welfare Committee,” each consisting of the same Government dele- gates but with its separate group of assessors, and that the meeting of the one. committee should be held immediately after that of the other (a joint session being arranged at the discretion of the chairman if any of the subjects to be dis- cussed come within the purview of both). The discussions relating to the welfare of children at this first meeting naturally resolved themselves into a choice of methods and of subjects for future consideration.