DECAY OF HOME LIFE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume L, Issue 59, 26 April 1907, Page 2

DECAY OF HOME LIFE.

Per Press Association. •Auckland, .April 26. Some remarks on public morals and economics, and what he tunned the decay in home life, were made bv Bishop Aeligau this afternoon at the' annual meeting of the Society for the Protection of Women and Children, and the I reveutiou of Cruelty to Animals. Too report of the society showed that during the past year 258 cases, ineludinc domestic infelicity, affiliation cases and cruelly to young children, failure to support parents, and similar matters, had " been dcalth with. In 1005 the number was 258, and in 1000 it was 245. It seemed, he said, that the proportion of such, cases was altogether too large, when the population of Auckland was taken into account, It was a feeble argument to say tliat the number in Auckland compared favorably with the Old Country, for opportunities for healthy development of public morality there were not so great as in New Zealand. He spoke of the cases of cruelty to young children, and said that the increase in affiliation eases was becoming a serious matter. The refusal of persons in many cases to support their parents was also commented upon as an extraordinaiy offence. He urged, as means of combatting these growing evils, that every effort should be niad.o to raise tho tone of home life as much as possible, as he feared that in a large number of cases referred to the cause was decay in homo life. Referring to New Zealand j legislation, he feared that our laws had not produced the result that their ndvocall's had hoped, for they could not be said to make people moral by economic means. They could- help them, hj« adnutted, but right down nt the bottom of any .measure for the betterment of any people lay the great tiuestion of morality in national Ufo.