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South Canterbury Times, Issue 2436, 8 January 1881, Page 2

It is refreshing at a time when fraud is tolerably rampant and usually successful to find it sometimes overleaping itself. The punishment that has just overtaken a notorious family in Christchurch of the name of Murphy is an exceptionally interesting verification of a variety of fine old moral maxims which human ingenuity has of late years been putting out of joint. The Murphy r brothers evidently belonged to a class of human vultures by no means uncommon in tlie colonies, who prey upon fanners and other industrial unfortunates. They neither ploughed, sowed nor harrowed, but they reaped, notwithstanding. Lying, scheming, swindling, plundering, and cheating seems to have been their forte. In the Murphy dictionary there was no such word as morality. Possibly, like others of the same species, they cultivated their ignorance so that it might hide their knavery and compound with their consciences. It is a good thing for society that such a precious pair have been exposed and punished. T 1 ie cheat and the perjurer, brothers In afiliction, and twin brothers in rascality, are now keeping company in the same establishment. The man who tried to rob a poor farmer of his hard earnings by altering an agreement, and the other rogue who endeavored to save his disreputable relative by hard swearing have received a righteous reward. Let us hope that their case will he a warning to others of their kidney. “ The way of the transgressor is hard ” says the old proverb, and there is another equally appropriate, ,l Honesty is the best policy.’’ The Murphys, if we can judge by their inglorious exit from the stage of liberty, have been endeavoring to prove that “ dishonesty is the best policy and honesty the worst one,” but they have failed. There are many Murphys in the colony whose morals need the renovating inlluence of a short contact with prison rations. Something will yet have to done in the shape of legislation to save the industrial classes from the rapacity of the unscrupulous vendors of badly acquired wealth. Usury and extortion have of late years been thriving to an alarming extent, and alluring speculations have driven hard working, plodding, and seemingly prosperous colonists into the spider’s webs that assailed them right and left. The Farmers’ Co-opera-tive movement is one step in the right direction, because its object is to enable farmers to stand clear of unprincipled agents who have lately been growing like Upas trees on the field of industry, withering with their poisonous exhalations everything around them.