BY-LAWS AND MORALS.

Press, Volume LIII, Issue 15917, 2 June 1917, Page 8

BY-LAWS AND MORALS.

A CITY COUHCIL'S EEVENGE.

SUNDAY GOLF AND PICTURF POSTEBS.

(special to ''the TRESS.") . WELLINGTON, June 1." For some weeks there has been soma agitation in Wellington regarding tbo exhibition of posters outside picture theatres and elsewhere, which aro said to bo objoctionable. The Minister has lately circularised municipalities asking them to take such action by by-law or otherwise as 'will prevent the exhibition of these offending posters. In actual fact the posters which were the cause of the agitation in the beginning had nothing to do with any picturo theatre, but with another theatre, but the original cause hag been lost sight of long ago, and now the clamour is for the suppression of the lurid film poster. A few weeks ago the City Council had a difference, first with a Magistrate, and then with the Supremo Court, about a by-law by which the Council sought to prevent tho playing of golf on Sundays on a little golf course on a city reserve which the Council laid out some months ago. Tho Supreme Court held that tho Council had no power to make # a by-law. tho breach of which would involve only tho breach of a religious or moral rule, and declared that tho bj-law by which Sunday golf was prohibited had no other real purposo' than to enforco Sunday I observance, and was therefore bad. Tho Council has apparently determined to reduce to an absurdity if possible tho ruling of tho Court, for it approved last night of the report of the By-laws Committee on the Minister's letter, "That, as the question appeared to be one of morals, tho Minister bo informed that the Council has no power to deal with it." The Minister protests to-day that this decision is preposterous, and that tho Municipal Corporation,, Act gives a municipality ampin powers to deal with tho postor ovil. So long, however, as the Council determines to give to clause 347 of tho Municipal Corporations Act tho wide interpretation which tbo Supreme Court gave to it in tho Sunday golf case, it cannot acccpt tho Ministor 8 invitation to doal with tbeso lurid posters. There is another opinion in tho Council also which is not offiically expressed. It is that the Minister ought himself to make arrangements to deal with invasions of public decency.