AN UNWELCOME CONSEQUENCE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XX, Issue 33, 3 June 1892, Page 27

AN UNWELCOME CONSEQUENCE.

(Melbourne Advocate May 14)

In Mine statistical returns issued by the Government statist, and showing the growth of Melbourne and suburbs, we find a comparison to which we cannot refrain from directing attention. There were, it is said, 122 more illegitimate births in 1891 than in the previous year, and the increase is altogether ont of proportion to the increase in population. This becomes evident from the fact the proportion of illegitimate births to the whole number of births has risen from one in 14 to one in 13. The painful aspect of tbe cm*, as thus presented, is that there is nothing exceptional in it. For several years past the number of illegitimate births, as compared with the population, or the total births, has been rising, and this has bsen the experience of every country in which the secular system of education was estabished. It particularly attracted the attention of distinguished writers and politicans of the United States who applied themsleves to the study of social questions, and were so led to investigations which sadly confirmed the conclusions at which they had arrived on the data previously available to them. From their commentaries we have at different times given extracts in this journal, but the painful facts disclosed in Mr Hayter's statistics are calculated, we should think, to produce a still deeper impression on tbe moral sense of tbe community on whose reputation the returns of the statist so unfavourably reflect. The anti-Christian system of public instruction which obtains in this colony is now just about old enough to produce a full, or nearly full, crop of the evil fruit which a bad tree invariably yields, and so it follows that tbers is nothing in Mr Hayter's disclosures to surprise us. The evil remits of the secular system are nothing more than we expected from its introduction. From the sad experience of other lands, and upon still higher authority, we were able to predict what has happened ; but the advocates of the system pooh-poohed all ■uch fears, and, unfortunately for the country, they found credulous members of other denominations who put faith in their declarations. Even now, though the facts are undeniable and their significance plain, there is no prospect that a remedy will be applied to the evil to which they so gloomily point. The bitter experience the country has had of an un-Christiau system of education should not, however, be lost on Catholics. The disclosures to which we have reluctantly adverted should make them still more earnest and generous in the support thsy are giving their own schools. Above all, Mr Hayter's birth returns should act as a warning to parents that only by the utmost circumspection and vigilance can they hope to protect their children from falling into what is becoming the besetting sin of this colony.