POLITICAL RUFFIANISM.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume I, Issue 38, 8 September 1887, Page 2

POLITICAL RUFFIANISM.

The Canterbury rowdies have been distinguishing themselves again. Not satisfied with pelting candidates at their meetings with rotten eggs and dead cats, they now earn notoriety by pursuing a man along the road, pelting him with eggs, mud, stones, and water-soaked tussocks to such a degree that he must fain cry mercy and “ beg of them not to kill him." Time was when Canterbury posed as the home of culture and refinement but now its name stinks in the public nostrils as the abode of the vilest larrikinism and ruffianly rowdyism worthy of a San Francisco hoodlum. If this sort of thing is to be tolerated no decent man will care to enter the political arena at all. Of the conduct of the police on this latest occasion we hear nothing : they were probably engaged in chasing a small boy who possessed a shanghai or playing the sneak under a public house window. These are about the main occupations of a New Zealand policeman—when he is really urgently wanted.

Thereal remedy for this blackguardism is twofold—let the ringleaders suffera double punishment, disenfranchisement from voting privileges for ten years and a £2O fine; if boys or young men Under age, a.hearty, well laid on application of the birch. This larrikinism is becoming a

pestilent curse in New Zealand, and the sooner it is radically wiped out the better.