July 26.
Otr issue of Wednesday contained an account of the coming to the little town of Sandbach in Cheshire of five hundred children from Vienna who are to be the guests of the town for the summer. Surely a more pathetic scene than those little ones, the sons and daughters of our former enemies, standing on the pier at Folkestone and striving to sing in unfamiliar English the words of our national anthem has rarely been. Unless we are mistaken Sandbach is not the first nor the only English town to extend its hospitality to Austrian children. Tt was the Scandinavian people who first set the example of this beautiful hospitality but we were the first of the warring nations to imitate it.
Children to-day occupy a very different position in the home and in the state to that assigned to them a few years ago. Less than a year ago there were living, in a north of England mining village, three old women who, when mere babes, had been harnessed, like Esquimaux dogs, to the empty trucks in the coal mine in order to haul them to the working-face for the miners to fill. Parents in those days corrected their children with rigour unknown to the present generation and discipline in schools was often akin to savagery. Now the child has come into his own and as the founder of Christianity '"'set once again, that in our~small!home atmosphere away from! child in the midst" so our latest
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.