POISONING OF SHEARERS.

Feilding Star, Volume XVII, Issue 22, 25 July 1895, Page 2

POISONING OF SHEARERS.

It is our earliest hope that the authorities in Queensland will be able to bring to the bar of justice the perpetrators of the horrible crimes committed at Barcaldine and Hughenden, by which a number of men have been poisoned. The rewiird offered is sufficiently large to tempt one at least of the poisoners to betray his fellow criminals. We assume that more than one person is implicated because the two stations where the men have been poisoned, are many miles apart and the poison appears to have been administered about the same time at each place. We are given to understand that " labor troubles " have been the inciting cause, and from what has happened before in that connection in Europe as woll as in Australia, we are compelled to con fess that the conjecturs appeam to be made on good grounds. Still, it is a dreadful blot on our boasted civilization that men should yet believe that only by the commission of such cowardly aud hideous crimes they can redress their wrongs — whether real or imaginary. Such men must have either a thorough contempt for the law, or be so brutal in their nature as almost to put them outside the pale of average human beings, and in either case they deserve to be treated with the utmost severity when detected and brought to justice. The hand of every man should be against them, and they should be hunted to death as noxious reptiles. They cannot plead provocation, for wantonly putting a number of the fellows to a fearfully painful death whom, very likely, they had never seen. We have no details as to how the poison was administered yet, but no doubt, each day will bring new disclosures.