Melbourne Larrikins.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 2, Issue 241, 13 January 1881, Page 2

Melbourne Larrikins.

Bishop Moorhouse, in his inaugural address at the opening of the Church of England Assembly of Victoria, recently, thus refers to the educated larrikin “ I hear it, on the testimony of a public office, that already in Victoria we are developing a new type of criminal. In the Old Country, he says, and in the early days of the colony, he had no difficulty of getting information about crime. Now, however, the educated larrikin is driving the police to their wits’ end. This modern Victorian criminal is intelligent enough to know the advantages of combination. He keeps his own counsel and baffles the police. Now observe that of this class of 1 crime (the most dangerous of all) there will be absolutely no records in the returns of our Police Courts and Assizes.; For the most part of it is committed with impunity. It goes to swell that enormous mass of sensual sin of which the law takes no notice ; of which its returns exhibit no trace, although they are so often fallaciously quoted as a reliable test. of our moral condition. You know what ordinary criminals are. You have yet to learn what intelligent criminals can be—what a scourge to society, what a terrible peril to the common weal th.”