THE DANGER OF DAILY PAPERS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume X, Issue 494, 29 September 1882, Page 19

THE DANGER OF DAILY PAPERS.

(Prom the Homeless Boy.) Daily papers ought to have some one to watch them, or they will not know when, or where they ought to stop. No Christian family can read them novv without scruples of conscience. If it be wrong to listen to scandal with pleasure, it is equally wrou* to read it day after day m the pipers. Instead of being vehicles for information papers are now sewer-pipes of scurility, blasphemy, an I slander and many a youn^ innocent heart is contaminated by reading the vile stuff that is daily distributed throughout the country. We believe m the freedom of the Press in its true sense, that is, the public should have some responsible teacher who may, untrammelled, call for the malting of laws, when such are necessary, to question the duties of those who govern, and complain when there is reason. But that a newspaper is free, to do that which would exclude an individual froii respectable society is evidently absurd. What benefit does humanity derive from a knowledge of its depravity when such depravity is 0^ 6 " M * neceasi< / of nafct "-c ? What right has a stranger to steal the inner secrets of the sacred precincts of the family to parade them before an uncharitable world ? Has the individual no rights which the newspaper men must respect, ? Scarcely a day goes by that thousands of people who read the papers do nut give expression to their disgust at the impertinence and villany of the reading matter cast into their homes. Parents whose business necessitates readme papers, end who are conscientious in the discharge of their parental SJ v f thf" young, are obliged to be vigilant. They must forbid their little daughters and sons the reading of stuff that must soil their innocent souls. There is no question whatever of thedamage caused by neglect. No Catholic pareut can permit his child to read the daily papers without doing wroag. It is a rare thing to find any of them free fr m deviltry of some kind or other. We hear general complaint of the alarming increase of crime in our midst, and why wonder when our public journals ridicule the most sacred things, gloat over the foulness of human depravity and vie with each other in their endeavors to gather filth from the drain* of every city m the land, t hus doi ng a positive injury to the unguarded youth who daily peruse the fetid pages. Then our public schools smother belief in God or a future, and give no religious instruction, but, on the other hand, inculcate the absurd and insidious idea that all religions are equally good or bad, and none of them necessary Bo long as these two principles of destruction exist, so long must we warn parents to guard their children from them if they would raise up a generation of pure and noble men. Some may think we are an alarmist— but by no means. Compare our youth to-day with those of twenty years ago and you will feel forced to acknowledge that enildren are worse now than they used to be, and because the occasions for evil are more numerous, the daily papers supplying a surfeit of instruction in every department of sin, while a word of respect for real vntue is a rare thing. *^