CHILDREN'S COUNTRY HOLIDAYS FUND.
(To THE EDITOR CF THE " SPECTATOR.")
810,—We are straining every nerve to save the babies, but we must not overlook the children who are in need of solvation too. and one of the ways of saving our town-bred and town-pent children is to provide for them a breath of freeh air and a glimpse of the land they live in. I know of no more benign charity than the Children's Country Holidays Fund. It is entirely beneficent, absolutely hygienic. There are no drawbacks in connexion with it, and no one need have misgivings in subscribing to it. It gives an invaluable fillip to nutrition, and a spiritual stimulus to the little ones whom it helps, and it should not be allowed to languish at a time when there is a special and urgent call for the assistance it gives.
The great nervous upheaval caused by the war has not left the children unmoved. They reflect the feelings of their elders, and have been mid are perturbed by the unaccustomed excitement, the painful partings, the anxious forebodings, the sadness and sorrow that the war has brought into so many humble homes. Shell shack is not confined to the combatants. The air raids have dazed some delicate children. I believe our teachers will tell us that our London schoolchildren are more highly strung, sensitive, and fidgety than they have ever been before, and if we had records of their sleeplessness, night mutterings, and terrors, we should realize that many of them are in the danger zone of nervous instability. But contact with Nature and change of scene are eminently soothing and steadying in nervous disturbances, and these the Holiday Fund offers to our war-worn children; while to all children, war-worn or not, it after& educational influences that are priceless. It secures to them showers, brief but refreshing, of new and delightful impressions that in the porous period of existence soak down into the sub- conscious life, to well up again in the arid after years with revivifying power, even until the final "babbling of green fields."
No town park, or playground, or trim parterre, or well-kept cemetery will compensate our children for the free communion with the wild Nature, which is, they feel, their very own, free from police and proprietary restrictions. Those who have seen the regiments of our little children going forth to their country holiday excursions pale and flaccid, and returning burnished with health, and with arms toll of already faded floral loot from the meadows and hedgerows, cannot doubt the utility of the Fund that works such wonders. There is no chapter in the gospel of relaxation more obligatory than that which inculcates the children's holidays. Many of us are no doubt curtailing our wonted holidays in these strenuous times; but the children should have theirs, if possible, in even ampler measure than before, and I would therefore appeal for such support to the Children's Country Holidays Fund as will enable it not only to maintain but to extend its wholesome and joy-giving usefulness.
But for the submarines I might suggest that some of our rich folk might lend their yachts to the Fund, so that groups of little Britishers might have short cruises, which, even if not unaccompanied by sea-siekness, would brace them up. Donations should be sent to the Secretary, Children's Country Holidays Fund, 18 Buckingham Street, Strand, W.C. am, Sir, de., JAMES CRICUTON-BROWNE.
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