The Ashburton Guardian. Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit. WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1886. A MORAL EPIDEMIC.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume V, Issue 1415, 24 November 1886, Page 2

The Ashburton Guardian. Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit. WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1886. A MORAL EPIDEMIC.

Surely there must be some inexorable, if occult, law which brings about the periodical recurrence of what, for lack of a better term, we may denominate epidemics of crime. Just as every now and then without any palpably apparent cause fell diseases break out in various parts of the world and sweep away their victims by the thousand, so periodically we are startled by the occurrence of a whole series of tragedies grouping themselves together at particular periods of time and in particular parts of the earth’s surface. Just now the baleful influence seems to have stretched its wings over the sister colony of New South Wales, where the public is literally supping full of horrors. Outrage after outrage against life and virtue is chronicled day after day, the details of these dreadful crimes being well-nigh incredible in their brutality. It wou’d seem indeed that there are ruffians among the population of that fair colony of a type so depraved as would be a disgrace to savagedom, nay, who possess instinct? lower than those of the lowest of the brute creation. Within the past few weeks instances of depravity and brutality have followed fast one upon another, and only yesterday came to band accounts of two tearful tragedies enacted on the same day, one in the suburbs of Sydney and the other at the pretty little up-country town of Albany. In both cases murder was followed by suicide, in the one the perpetrator of these dreadful crimes being a laboring man, and in the other a teacher at a collegiate institution. The one cut bis wife’s and his own throat from ear to ear, and the other finished the lives of both with a pistol. Surely this gregarious tendency of dreadful deeds is very remaikable, and may well set us thinking as to whether or not there be some common cause to which they can be referred. The world has grown too wise to believe any longer in the evil influence of particular planets or planetary conjunctions, which was the theory of the ancient astrologers, and we suspect that the real origin of the disregard for virtue and even for life which is shown by such horrors as we are continually called upon to chronicle is to be sought for in moral and not physical conditions. Is it that large numbers of people have lost their faith in the existence of any world beyond this and in any Being to whom they are accountable for their actions. Is it, in a word, because religion, so far as great numbers of people are concerned, is looked upon as played out—as an exploded superstition ? Verily it looks not unlike it, and if these things be the first-fruits of a widely-spreading agnosticism we may well ask—What then will the harvest be?