Sending Children Overseas
The offers from the United States and the Dominions to receive British children for the duration of the war have been gratefully accepted by the British Government, which has promptly established a Children's Overseas Reception Board under the chairmanship of Mr. Geoffrey Shakespeare. Regard- ing the general value of this measure of evacuation there can scarcely be two opinions. Mr. Churchill has described this island as a fortress—and by that he means one that is guarded not only by fighting men but by all sorts of workers and all who have a citizen's part to play. There is no conceivable necessity for retaining children in a fortress unless parents feel that to remain at home is better for their character and well-being. There need be little fear that those who go will not be well cared for. The offer to accept them springs from the sense of common race and common ideals which the Dominions share with the Home Country, or, so far as America is concerned, from sympathy and sense of kinship. The reception of some thousands or tens of thousands of British children in Dominion homes will strengthen the ties that bind the Empire together in the best possible way—by personal intercourse.
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