MODERN MORALITY.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIX, Issue 5238, 13 February 1928, Page 1

MODERN MORALITY.

_ HAVE WE IMPROVED ? LITTLE REASON TO APOLOGISE'. Morality means right behaviour, not only in sex matters, but in all the relations of life ; and °ver nine-tenths of the moral field we have improved out of all recognition since Queen Victoria was born (says an exchange). It was scarcely metre than a century ago that the inhabitants of London were described by one of the most impartial of historians! as “the most odious and brutal rabble in Europe.” Drunkenness was universal. No “gentleman” went sober to bed. Had the law arrested men for drunkenness there would have been no room in the gaols. To ask us to believe that at such a period the honour of women was safer, their virtue less exposed to peril than it is to-day, is really a. little too much. The amusements of the people were of the coarsest description. Hanging took place in public and was voted excellent fun. Parties were made up to witness an execution as for a first-class sporting event, the day being rounded off with riot apd revelry. There was no dearth of this sort of entertainment, for aUthe beginning of the nineteenth century there were more than a hundred capital crimes, such offences as picking pockets, stealing from a shop or from a dwell-ing-house being punishable with death. A child under ten was actually lying under sentence of death in Newgate Gaol for petty pilfering when, iw 1823, this barbarous code was repealed. It was no uncommon thing for children to be put to death at the hands of the law. “* Has there been no awakening of the public conscience, no advance in the general standard of morality, since such atrocities were sanctioned in this Christian land ? OTHER CRUELTIES. Remember, too, the frightful abuses of the factory system in its early days. . ‘ , Children driven intot he Lancashire cotton-mills at nine years of age or sooner worked sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, cuffed and beaten to keep them awake. Women, and even young girls, harnessed to trucks, and crawling • “dike beasts of burden through the dark subways of the coal mines. , Imagine the cruelty and-callousness of an age which suffered these things, to continue, incessant agitation being necessary to arouse the, sluggish coniscience of the nation. And all this, remember, not much more than a hundred years ago. Sex morality is no doubt vastly important, but it would take a lot of stray kisses to outweigh this, black load of infamy. Judged by any standards, we have little reason to apologise to our ancestors, even to our immediate progenitors. Viewing the history of the nineteenth century, the difficulty is not to blush for our grandparents. REALLY RESPECTABLE. To look only at one aspect of public morality and ignore the rest is to distort the meaning of the word—and the meaning of life. A man who resisted sex temp’tation wnile he.thieved, lied and played the general ruffian, would have a poor title to cannonisation or even to a certificate from any body of public moralists. No, as I said at the beginning, we h,ave become a very decent lot. Heaps better than we used to be. In fact no one could ever have expected those early Victorians to have such respectable descendants as the present population of this sea-grit isle*