Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1909. A SOCIAL PROBLEM.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 60, 8 September 1909, Page 6

Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1909.

A SOCIAL PROBLEM.

An address delivered by Sir John Madden, the Chief Justice of Victoria, to the congregation of the Australian Church, Melbourne, lias excited a good deal of comment in his own State, and is not without its interest on this side of the water. The subject of the discourse was "Our Gravest Peril," which the lecturer considered to be juvenile immorality, and especially the precocity of young girls in wrong-doing. "Everyone realised the vital importance which the purity, chastity, and honour of a nation's women were to the nation," said the Chief Justice. "If women were indisposed to regard virtue and purity as being of great importance, and if they would not impress their importance on their children, then the results were so far-reaching and disastrous that war, famine, and pestilence were incomparably milder afflictions." Nobody of sense and decency will be disposed to quarrel with Sir John Maddens general statement of the gravity of the evil in question, though not a few critics have challenged the soundness of his contention that it is on the increase. The premises from which he argued were the records of philanthropic institutions, and the facts "brought from time to time under his notice in his judicial capacity. No doubt n judge who is constantly trying criminal cases acquires v special knowledge oi' the Aeamy side of life which i» denied tq

most respectable people ; but this knowledge does not of itself constitute a sufficient clue to the moral conditions of the State as a whole. It does not even qualify him to decide whether immorality is permanently gaining ground among the classes least able to resist it, since for that purpose a comparison extending over a long period of time, and bringing the experienceb of his predecessors on the Bench into account, would be required. Nevertheless, when the Chief Justice of Victoria speaks of having recently tried a case in which the child-mother was only just *over 12£ years old, he testifies to a fact of which no optimistic statistical comparison can take away the horror. And when he refers to "the ! marked and rapid increase ot childmothers in the Garlton Refugei" he satisfies, to some extent, the requirements of the comparative method. It does not appear, however, what length of time is covered by this record, nor do the statistics of illegitimacy for the whole State, as quoted by tho Age, lend any support to the inference of a general increase of this class of immorality. But wo are not specially concerned with the question whether the dark picture painted by Sir John Madden is darker than a strictly scientific diagnosis of the case would warrant. What concerns us is that the evil to which he refers is a terribly serious one in New Zealand, as in Victoria, and that ifc represents a vast amount of misery and depravity which demands far more effective measures to cope with it than have yet been carried out Sir John Maddens suggestions on this point are as appropriate to our own conditions a& to those of Victoria. With regard to the causes, he expressed the opinion, which he believed to be shared by most othex people, that one reason, ani perhaps the greatest, for the spread of the evil, was the weakening of parental control. Here the Chief Justice must be admitted to be on firm ground. The comparatively easy conditions of life in these young and flourishing countries, the encouragement given by the climate to the spending of spare hours out of doors, the large extent to which the State has relieved parents of the duty of attending to the education of theiv children, the freedom of manners, and the relaxing of social conventions, which is natural vo a community untrammelled by the traditions of an ancient civilisation, and the general, extension of the spirit of democracy to spheres where it has no proper footing — all these circumstances have combined to weaken parental responsibility and to deprive the children of that domestic control for which no external authority can provide a, substitute. As to Jiow this de.plorable gap is to be filled, Sir John Madden makes no suggestion. Napoleon's dictum that education must begin with the mothers has a clear application there; .and if the fathers were educated too, the children would then have a reasonable chance. But how is the education of the eiders to be put in hand? They certainly cannot be sent back to echool or college. The great educational agencies of the church, the press and public opinion, seem to be tne, only pedagogues that can be invoked to help them, and every one of these agencies might increase its present activity along this particular line. The native-born generation is getting opportunities in the way of 'scholastic education which hundreds of the preceding generation nad to do without, but in the matter of home training it has to encounter a handicap which forms a very serious set-off to this great advantage. "The manifest decay of the religious sense," to wnich Sir John gladden refers as another serious cause, is of a kindred nature to that already considered. Whatever the State school or the 'Sunday-school may do towards directly or indirecuy fostering this sense, must be infinitesimal in comparison with the influences of the home life. The habit of reverence is to be acquired not by book-learning, but by a contagion of the spirit for which in ordinary cases no institution can sup.ply an adequate substitute for' the same, as the much-decried irreverence of too many colonial cnildren abundantly testifies. Correct tne home-training, and Sir John Maddens proposal of a curfew bell to take cnildren, and especially girls, off tne streets at a certain hour might prove a valuable supplement. But the cm few alone will not go far.