An Undesirable Immigrant.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 40, 2 October 1902, Page 1

An Undesirable Immigrant.

There are few things in this world that excite such a feeling of loathing and disgust in the minds of ordinary rightthinking people as a shameless and degraded woman. There seems to be a consensus of opinion amongst all who have had a wide experience of the world that when a woman really goes to the bad, she becomes thoroughly, hopelessly, irredeemably bad, and clean-minded people shrink from contact with her as they would from the deadly plague or the loathsome leprosy. The feeling of repugnance is intensified when the abandoned creature is so bereft of every particle of womanly shame as to publicly parade her depravity by delivering lectures and circulating literature which only minister to the pruriency and lowest passions of those who hear and read them and which are in their essential nature and effects indecent and obscene. To this class belongs the ordinary specimen of the bogus 'ex-nun ' lecturer. The type is fortunately not a common one, but the few specimens that have appeared before the public have so closely resembled each other in their character and career that it is easy to give a general description of the genus. As a rule the selt-styled 'ex-nun' lecturer has never even been a Catholic, much less a nun. She is usually, like Maria Monk, an out-and-out bad woman, who has been an inmate of some Catholic reformatory for fallen and incorrigible girls. It is there that she has first come in contact with Catholic nuns, it is there she has gained the only knowledge and experience she has ever had of the daily round of life in a convent. It is of course only a smattering of the mere external routine of the nuns' life that she has thus been able to acquire but it is enough to enable her to deceive and delude credulous Protestants into the belief that she is able to speak from actual experience as a nun, and accordingly she comes out as ' the eloquent and brilliant ex-Romanist' to deliver—with admission at so much per head—thrilling lectures on ' Convent Life Exposed, and on the 'secrets and horrors of the Confessional.' It is a miserable sordid story of debased and degraded womanhood, but it is the almost invariable history of the life and character of the self-styled ' ex-nun.'

There was a time when there was a mint of money in this anti-Catholic lecturing business, but those palmy days have gone forever. The obviously interested motives, the unreliableness of the evidence, and the immorality of the lives of these mone> -grubbing no-Popery scavengers have been so thoroughly and completely exposed of late that no respectable member of society would be seen going near their'gatherings. In New Zealand in particular, and especially since the recent Slattery exposure and fiasco, the game of fooling the Protestant public «s completely 'played out/ and it is safe to assert that the creature who has secretly and silently descended on Dunedin, and whose disgustingly suggestive handbills are being distributed throughout the city, will meet with a very frosty reception and will depart from amongst us very little richer— except in experience— for her visit to our shores. In a ' special notice in her bills this woman ' desires to call the attention of the citizens of this city to the fact that there may possibly appear

in the local papers libellous articles against her character and work.' So far as we are concerned, the creature need not be alarmed. Josh Billings, in one of his natural history essays, remarks that ' The pole-cat is so called because it is not convenient to touch it with anything but a pole, and the longer the pole the more convenient.' From our point of view, these odious ' ex-nun ' lecturers come under precisely the same category. So far as our taste and inclination go, it is certainly not convenient to touch these lecturers with anything butapole.and we have no pole long enough to enable us to even begin to approach them with any regard to our feeling of comfort and decency.