Callous Sight-Seers.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 4380, 2 March 1909, Page 3

Callous Sight-Seers.

AN UNPLEASANT SUBJECT,

There is one aspect of the funeral tendered by the citizens of Wellington on the victims of the Penguin disaster (says a Wellington paper) which should not be dismissed without notice. Naturally no one likes to make unpleasant remarks about the people of one’s own city, especially the women folk, but there appears to be a unanimity of sentiment among the ordinary males who attended the funeral that the women, or at any rate a considerable porticn of them, displayed a degree of callousness and a tendency to regard the whole affair as a circus with the clowns left out, rather than as an expi'ession of sympathy with the victims of anaiion d dixas’er.

And along the line of route women and children assembled in their hundreds, and it was on every hand evident that curiosity and rot sympathy was the prevalent sentiment. At the cemetery the state of things was much worse. It is not necessary, in fact it is too painful, to go into much detail, but at one graveside the women pressed so closely on the grave, and the clatter was so insistent, that the officiating clergyman was forced to plead for silence, and in another case, where four young children were being buried, the bearers had almost to fight their way through the thickly-wedged ranks of the women who had assembled to see the sight. “ Come over here and see it, Elsie,” said one woman to her two-year-old child as the remains of one tiny victim was borne along. Tombstones and graves were converted into vantage points, and mere men turned sick. This is no exaggeration. The women behaved as one could imagine the women behaving in a Roman amphitheatre when gladiator met gladiator or the Christians were thrown to the lions. The Penguin passengers died to make a sensational holiday for at least a large number of the the' feminine population of the Empire City.