The White Ribbon: FOR GOD AND HOME AND HUMANITY Monday, June 15, 1903. The Degenerate.

White Ribbon, Volume 9, Issue 97, 1 June 1903, Page 6

The White Ribbon: FOR GOD AND HOME AND HUMANITY Monday, June 15, 1903. The Degenerate.

The women of New Zealand cannot but be grateful to Dr Symes for his able treatment of the subject of degenerates at the meeting held under the auspices of St. Saviour's Guild and briefly reported in our columns. The marvel is that society has so long delayed taking action in the matter. We say society advisedly, for it is certainly due to the apathy displayed by

the general public that our legislators have not hitherto concerned themselves with this special menace to the race ; that, as Hishop Julius remarked, noxious weeds rather than noxious lives have been the subject of debate. And it is proof, we suppose, that our evolution is still in its infancy that we concern ourselves so largely with the skin scratches of the body politic, and let pass with scant comment the deep seated disease.

A case or two of small pox occurs on a vessel touching our shores, and the news is Hashed from end to end of the colony, anil all manner of precautions and pains are taken not only to isolate and heal the sufferer, but also to discover and disinfect everything and everybody that may possibly have been in contac. with the diseased or the disease germ. And well that it is so. But what can be said of the method hitherto adopted of dealing with the one suffering from an inexpressibly more dread and dangerous disease ?

We shut him her) up for a few weeks or months, as the case may be, without any special treatment to endeavour to combat the disease, and then let him loos’, in his still abnormal condition, upon society, to bring darkness and desolation into many a life, many a home, and, saddest of all, to transmit his own depraved lendencies to a third and a fourth generation. -