God Speed !

New Zealand Tablet, Volume 19, 19 July 1906, Page 9

God Speed !

Bad books (as rcrreyve points out) corrupt the mind and blot out the boundary lines of honor. But an even more insidious evil lies in the detestable leaflets and pamphlets that are distributed through the mails by 'medical' quackheads. The Medical Association has at last taken the evil in hand. Here is a Press Association telegram from last Friday's daily papers :— ' A deputation from the Medical Association waited on the Minister for Justice to-day, and urged that something should be done to prevent the circulation of indecent pamphlets of a quasi-medical character, and the publication of questionable advertisements by quacks in newspapers. The Minister admitted the importance of the matter, but saw difficulties in the way of properly dealing with the evil. He promised to give the subject consideration.' J We wish the Medical Association God-speed in their crusade. And we hope, as one result of their representations, that ' the butt-end of the law ' will fall heavily upon the purveyors of the blackguardly stufl that is mailed all over the Colony by the proprietors of certain quack ' electric ' remedies. The same remark applies to certain quack advertisements that are accorded the hospitality of the advertising columns of the secular press. Some years ago Chief Justice Darley (N.S.W.) declared that certain of the advertisements here referred to are responsible for an enormous amount of secret murder in the coirimunity. The young people of . both sexes who peruse the announcements and the pamphlets . in question receive" what has been aptly termed ' a liberal education in depravity anfl crime '. The proposal urged upon the Minister of Justice by the Medical Association would at least, if acted upon, diminish the

volume of indecent ana criminal suggestion that is at present allowed to flow unchecked into the public mind It would thus strongly tend, in so far, to check one of the prolific causes of youthful demoralisation.