Moral (!) Melbourne

Feilding Star, Volume XIV, Issue 58, 3 November 1892, Page 4

Moral (!) Melbourne

v The Melbourne correspondent of the Taieri ' Advocate' prefers this serious indictment against the Victorian capital : — '• Melbourne is, as you are possibly aware, anything but a virtuous city. It is not long since Mr Hayter, calmly calculating the propertion of births to marriages, and the number of illegitimate births registered, quiety announced that one-fourth of the female population between the ages of eighteen and thirty must be living in some form of concubinage, while not one man in 500 pretends to decency of life, or refrains from jesting at the idea ot virtue. Our priests coir c boldly forward in defence of the wealthy rogues who have stolen the sayings of industry, and filched the bread the father (dying) left his widow and his children, All these things, aye, and worse, we endure, but we will not allow a sacred concert on a Sunday} No, young man, go where you will — the public houses or the houses of Rahab ; go down the bay in the scandalous society of the bookmakers and their planted hussies, who are much given to the trip — but you shall not pay a shilling to hear the best music sung by the best singers, A wretched band of artists with much difficulty gained permission to hold a concert at the Prahran .Town Hall on a recent Sunday. They had to submit to all sorts of humiliating restrictions. The town clerk" was appointed to revise their programme, and after allowing a list of sixteen numbers he cut out three more. A police constable stood by in the room to prevent applause, and the whole proceedings were made to wear as guilty a look as possible. Yet every public-house in the district was doing a roaring trade, and in the immediate neighborhood of the hall there are upwards of 100 infamous houses, about a dozen of which belong to a municipal councillor."