AUSTRALIA’S NATURAL CURSE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 814, 19 February 1910, Page 4

AUSTRALIA’S NATURAL CURSE.

AN OUTSPOKEN BISHOP

At a confirmation service in St. John’s Anglican Church, Gundagia, Bishop Barlow, ol Gonlbnru, delivered a vigorous address on gambling, and applied it to both home and national life. He declared that gambling gripped the people with such deadly force as to constitute the greatest blot upon the life of the nation. His indictment was directed as much against society people, who should set an example, as against the form ol evil with which the people were familiar. Some of the houses of the supposed best classes were at times tumid into veritable gambling dens, where people alleged to he assembled out of friendship, sought to take from other people what they had not earned. His experience in Australia of gambling, with its sinuous, snake-like, soul-destroying forces, left upon his mind the sad impression that it was worse than one might expect from the lowest haunts in Italy and the slums of Naples. Even some of his own friends, he was sorry to admit, sank away their substance through such channels as Tattersall’s sweeps. Gambling, above everything else, was the national curse in Australia. Kis advice to the people of Australia, if they desired to save the nation from being totally strangled by the great evil of gambling, was to fight against all temptations in that direction, including playing bridge for stakes.