AUSTRALIA TO-DAY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 14854, 4 December 1911, Page 5

AUSTRALIA TO-DAY.

THE CASE OF MR. MEAGHER. [FROM OCR OWN CORRESPONDENT.] ;.,;'" Sydney, November, 25. Can a man live down his past—always Or is it a public duty in certain cases to forbid it? These questions are prompted by the slander case, Meagher v. Onslow, and during the recent by-elections in the I member of the Liberal party in the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, and the verdict. Colonel Onslow, is a country be made a bitter attack on Mr Meagher, who is a member of the Labour party, and is also Chairman of Commit.tecs in the Legislative Assembly. He called him a criminal,, not mincing his words; and Mr. Meagher went before a judge and jury, claiming £2000 damages. The jury gave a verdict lor defendant, and the cost to Mr. Meagher will, it is stated, be in the neighbourhood of £600. It was an expensive attempt to vindicate his honour. That was the case that made Richard. Denis Meagher— Chairman of Committees, and a probable Lord Mayor of Sydneyiamous. Counsel for defendant, Air. Sliand, who is one of the smart en, banisters in Australia, did not hesitate himself in his address to the jury to condemn Mr. Meagher. " God help the country," lie said, "if wo are to have such men occupying the high oihciai positions of the land 1" Among Hie witnesses were Mr. Waddell, a inemoer of the Lib oral party and lonneriy Treasurer of the State, and Sir Alien iay lor, i,ord Mayor of Sydney. Mr. Waudeh, said Air. Mea&ner was a model member of .Parliament and in his official position was aosolutely lair and impartial. Sir Allen Taylor said ho had been closely associated wiCu Mr. Meagher for some ten years as a member oi the City Council, and had always found him absolutely honest and straightforward in all his dealings. ' The verdict would seem to point to the fact that the public may forgive but not torget; in otner words, that there are- certain crimes in tho calendar which a man can never wholly live down. Mr. Meagher had hopes of being made a Minister of ! tho Crown; how jar the jury's verdict I will operate against him in that connecj tion remains to be seen. Ho had. hopes of being elected Lord Mayor; will he now j stand • down I The Sydney Morning j Herald, commenting on the verdict, says in the coin-so of a remarkable leading I article : "Those who have sinned may i repent and will receive recognition and sympathy when they show themselves capI able of keeping straight but it is their j business to bo respectable citizens in the | ordinary walks of life and not to claim I free entry to positions by which the comi munity is inevitably judged. This, then, jis the essential point. Mr. Meagher I stands condemned before the public, not because a fellow-member of Parliament may call him a criminal, but because in tho interest of the community a high standard of public life must bo maintained.. It is undoubtedly a reflection upon tho State that he should have been elected to Parliament at all." Is He the Man? The arrest of Campbell Nairn Moir, a i young man of 22, at Essendon, a suburb 'of Melbourne, charged with the Glebe murder, was sudden and- to the general public unexpected. Only the Sydney newspaper reporters who had been following up the case knew of the expected development, and they were under a bond not to divulge it and so put the man on his guard. For news travels fast these days; what is in the Sydney papers appears • the same day *in the Melbourne papers, owing to the system of exchange ing news. The public had watched day after day for some news that would point to an early arrest, and no news came. People were beginning to give up thinking about the case, classing it with numerous other mysteries that have never , been solved, when suddenly" the arrest of the man at Essendon, where he had been living with his young wife for about a fortnight, was effected by the Melbourne detectives. Moir has made some admissions, including acknowledgment of the authorship of the "dentist's" letter sent to Trevascus from Penrith. His arrest has caused a sensation. He was well known here at the Technical College, where he was employed. Ho was liked by his fellow employees and was known among them as " Little Jimmy." But the main sensation is his relationship to Mr. Carmichael, tho New South Wales Minister for Labour and Education, who has in consequence of this resigned his portfolios. i A Novel Suggestion. Aeroplanes already have been put to many uses, but it remained for an individual who waited on the Chief Secretary the other day, to suggest their possibilities in the matter of catching criminals. He said ho could put tho detectives in the way of catching the murderer of Henry Trevascus, and when it was suggested that he should take the information to police headquarters it transpired that he had already been there but was not at all satisfied with his reception. As it was not desirable to leave any stone unturned in order to run a murderer to earth, the Chief Secretary consented to hear tho man. He then said he felt certain that tho murderer was concealed somewhere in the vicinity of Port Hacking, or Penrith, and he was equally certain there was only one way to catch nimand that was to send policemen up in aeroplanes. The Minister pointed out that he only knew of one aeroplane in Australia, and that the • police were not used to them anyway, but be promised to see what could be, done in tho matter. With that tho man was quite satisfied; and he went on to take the Chief Secretary further into ' nis confidence by mentioning that the In- . spector-General of Insane was an acquaint- : ance of his. Then ho produced a number i of pieces of paper that he said he had collected in the back streets of Penrith, 1 with the object of comparing the hand- '• writing on them with the letter which the police found in the murdered man's pocket. There is never any dearth of private Sherlock Holmeses when a real murder mystery is baffling police. Everyi body gets interested—sane men and luna- ; tics—and dozens of people, remembering ' little peculiar incidents, run to the police to tell them all about them, in case they have some remote bearing on the case; and they all have to be carefully listened to, for sometimes there may be something in them.

Dishonour in Sport. Australians pride themselves on being a great sport-loving community, and a I stranger might well be excused for think- ! ing they worshipped nrascio more than anything else in the world. But much of "their sport is not clean. It has been said before, and it has just been said again, this time by Judge Murray, at the Quarter Sessions, in Sydney. His i Honor said it seemed to him that the i standard of personal honour had' fallen ! very much lower in this country in regard to sport than they could wish. Men did things, that were tricky and deceitful, not because they themselves were at a low ! ebb of morality, but because they lived, ' so far as sport was concerned ,_ in an atI mosphere that was seething with dishoni our and deceit. Among, sporting people in Australia there seemed to be little chivalry and little honour. v He was prompted to make these remarks by the appearance before him of a man who had won a foot race by entering under a false name and giving wrong records of his performances, thus getting a bigger start than he would otherwise have got. _ His Honor touched on a weak spot in the Australian character, and ho misdit have referred, to other branches of sport ..where men do things iust as tricky and deceitful, and oftentimes more so. its the man who ran in a foot race. Clean sport is a. good tiling: but unclean sport weakens the moral fibre of the community. The Military College. For some reason it is difficult to account for, the applications for entrance to the newly-established military college' at Duntroonin Federal territoryare not as numerous as was hoped for. Is it that

Australians do not take kindly to soldiering? It was. said that Australians were not a sea-loving people, and that there would be difficulty in obtaining sufficient native-born sons to man the ships of the Commonwealth navy, but according to the naval authorities the difficulty was more imaginary than real, and all the lads required have been, or are being, enrolled. One would think, at any rate, that it would be n's easy to obtain boys for the military college as for the navy; yet it does not appear to be so. And this in a country that has just adopted a compulsory service scheme. Every Saturday now one may see boys who used to delight in running away to the football or cricket field going through their paces in the parks and other open spaces. They do not like it, of course, but it is compulsory. With the college it is a different thing; there is no compulsion about it. New Zealand is interested in this military college. The cadets at the college are to bo designated as the corps of staff cadets," and the establishment of the corps, including cadets from New Zealand, is 150. The Rise in Bents. There has been talk for a long time of the Government of New South Wales introducing a Fair Rent Bill. How it would operate is an interesting question., A Parliamentary select committee is at present investigating the recent abnormal increase in house rents, and a witness giving evidence on Thursday expressed the opinion that any attempt by the Legislature to regulate the prices of house rents would prove unsuccessful. Ho was a suburban land agent, and he attributed the marked increase in rents to the increased cost of building material, labour, and living, whilst he also stated that landlords mentioned -the graduated land tax as a reason for raising the rents. Four-roomed cottages, which three years ago cost the tenant 14s a week, now cost from 18s to 20s, md ho anticipated a further increase of 10 per cent. Other witnesses, occupying small shops in Hunter-street, city, told how within a few years the rent had increased from £2 10s a week to £7 10s. and a further riso was likely. Apart from the largo increase in population Sydney and suburbs now contain close on 700,000 souls—other things have no doubt operated. The law of supply and demand accounts largely for the increased rentals, but of recent 'years another law has come into —the law of " passing it on." The benefits., accruing from shorter hours of labour and increased wages would seem to be more or less imaginary, and the question is whether you can overcome economic laws by artificial means. Wages have increased from 25 to 50 per cent; the price of goods to the consumer has increased proportionately ; the cost of living generally has increased in the same ratio. A few years ago a man could buy for a sovereign what it. takes thirty shillings to buy now. Timber-workers, for instance, get higher wages than they used to get, and tho price of timber has been correspondingly increased to the builder. The builder charges moro for erecting a house. The landlord wants a higher rent. There may bo cases— doubt there where an * owner of house property is getting more than a fair interest on his money. Is thev Government going to fix rentals on a basis of so much per cent, on the cost of a house to the owner, with an allowance for wear and tear? Probably. Or will the Government itself become landlord and build houses and rent them to the people? Possibly.