EVIL DAYS.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 28 January 1933, Page 4

EVIL DAYS.

The ancient Persians taught their boys three great lessons: to ride a horse, to shoot with the bow, and to speak the truth—a remarkable and significant trinity. There was a time when the word of an English merchant or manufacturer was the supreme guarantee of good faith. The war period considerably blasted that enviable reputation —Masterton tradespeople had sad experience of trade trickery in those days and immediately after the war. We are now living in evil days. The old sanctities have lost the authority they once had. Much of our life is honeycombed with trickery, treachery, perjury and falsehood. Public money seems to rob of their conscience thousands that deal with it. It is filched and squandered by men who have lost the sense of shame. Judges and magistrates complain that it is often impossible to see the truth through the clouds of lies that witnesses concoct or have suggested to them. Fair reputations are sullied by unprincipled scandal-mon-gers; money is acquired by the falsest of misrepresentations—the whole "position is too pitiful for words.