Page:Picturesque Dunedin.djvu/215

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PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS.
193

beyond their expectations. Speaking at the tenth annual meeting of the Institution, the Rev. Dr. Stuart cheerily referred to its straitened circumstances and said:—"However dark the prospect seemed, it had always happened that funds were ultimately forthcoming. In the future the Committee would, no doubt, have similar experiences, and meet with similar difficulties, but they would also, without doubt, achieve similar victories." And they did.

As already stated, the Provincial Government, in the first instance, granted £250 towards the maintenance of the Institution. In the third year the Council voted £1000 for the like purpose, with a further sum of £500 towards the support of orphan and destitute children; the Government grant, thereafter, to be £2 for every £1 subscribed. In the sixth year, however, the subsidy was increased to £3 for every £1 subscribed, but the amount was afterwards reduced to £ for £. The public subscriptions (shillings and pence omitted) varied from £172 in the first year to £1,058 in the ninth year, and from £996 in the tenth year to £3,411 in the twenty-second year. In the twenty-third year they fell to £2,462, and in the year following, when the "Hospital and Charitable Institutions Act" came into operation, and did away with the absolute necessity for voluntary subscriptions, to £512, and two years later to £448. But as the yearly cost (all expenses told) far exceeded the subscriptions and Government subsidies, recourse to other ways of raising funds was necessary. These took the form of entertainments, bazaars, and carnivals. The first movement of the kind, in anticipation of, and to further, the formation of the Institution, and which yielded the sum of £64 9s. 6d, was the Garrick Club entertainment in 1862, under the direction of Mr. B. L. Farjeon. In 1864 a Committee of ladies successfully conducted a bazaar, which, with a concert and ball by Mr. Lyster, placed the sum of £1,717 in the hands of the Committee; and in the following year a bazaar, held in the Universal Bond, realised £1,026. In 1876 the opening of Guthrie and Larnach's large buildings (since destroyed by fire) was celebrated by a Carnival in aid of the Institution, £3,000 (with Government subsidy) being the result. In 1878 a second Carnival, held in A. and T. Inglis' premises, yielded £3,448, inclusive of subsidy. By a third