The Daily News. MONDAY, MAY 15, 1911. MORAL POLICEMEN.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 301, 15 May 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. MONDAY, MAY 15, 1911. MORAL POLICEMEN.

Throughout Australasia governments exist with an incurable passion for inventing new and weird laws. There is hardly any act the seemingly innocent citizen may do that some clever luminary cannot discover to be illegal. Although the average citizen does not concern himself for a moment about the operation of obscure and absurd laws, he is occasionally reminded by severe persons that he is a sinner. It may be reasonable, though, to indict a man for allowing his roof to blow on to somebody else's paddock, and it may be reasonable for the Salvation Army to obtain the permission of a city council to pray, but the latest vagary of the law, reported from the democratic Garden of Australia, is as amusing as the others. A man moved his own furniture after 7.50 evening. Whether the public conscience of Melbourne was shocked at this heinous crime no one knows, but a studious constable or a Carter's Union agitator, or some spotless person who does not cart furniture after dark, called attention to the Factories' Act, and the man was fined. It would not matter if the man was poor

or found it necessary to earn his living all day, and do his shifting at night. The law takes no cognisance of public or personal convenience. Some gifted legislator in an exalted moment had wedged his brilliant idea into a complicated Bill, and a magistrate had no option. There is no hope that colonial legislation will be reduced in bulk, for legislators as a body are fully convinced that their utility lies in the bulkiness of new and oppressive Acts. In Xew Zealand the complicity of the law is past all lay understanding, and several streets ahead of the ayerage legal mind. If the State would kindly detail its politicians out of session to lecture the people on the fewthings they may yet do without danger of being fined or sent to gaol, the innovation would be useful. It is problematical whether half a dozen of our legislators could give coherent information as to the effect of the new legislation thrown into the statute hooks during the present parliament. If the legislator does not know the law, the public has not a hope of knowing it. The modern method of dealing with citizens is to suspect that every one of them is aching to break a law, and to police them as effectually as possible. The passage of new restrictive laws is an assumption by legislators that their constituents are all dishonest. The idea of putting a new screw on the public is very dear to officialism, because it justifies the upkeep of armies of inspect-

ors and the creation of mora moral policemen. The job of being a moral policeman is bad for the morals of the policeman. Ultimately he must conclude that human nature in the bulk is bad, and that he himself is surrounded with a halo of spotlcssness. In order to discover what he may do without interference by moral policemen the newcomer to Austral lands should receive free instruction at the hands of the Crown law officers. He would be able to find out at once whether he was justified in carrying his own portmanteau, and whether the digging of his own garden was not in contravention of the award of the Amalgamated Society of Spade Workers. Glib talk about "the liberty of the subject" pacifies the subject into a belief that he is the freest thing in earth, air or sky; but there never has been such a thing as liberty of the subject, nor can there ever be. Censors of puldic morals are not necessarily moral, and when one notices thai certain men wail perpetually about the growing debasement of humanity one naturally issues the advice "physician heal thyself". Nowadays the commor pastime of "throwing the first stone" if a magnificent method of advertising th< thrower's alleged spotlessness, but, un

fortunately, whether the stone-thrower is political, ecclesiastical, or common clay, people merely get annoyed, and certainly don't improve under the lash. A new prohibitive law is the measure of blame the State casts at' the people. The law differentiates between the humble citizen who carts his own furniture in fne dark and the elect who whisks a new armchair to Potts Point in a motor car, chiefly because the latter has nothing to do with carters' unions or allied restrictive corporations. The State is superior to its own law. No one would summon a State servant for carting a waggonload of Hansards after dark, nor would factory inspectors invade the sacred precincts of a government building to stop the midnight clerk from ruining his esteemed health. The State rides by in its triumphant chariot, and notes the beauty of the prickly pear on a million acres of its own land, but its moral policemen sec no beauty in the half-acre of pear on the struggling selector's land. And for prickly pear, one may read blackEerry or ragwort or any other vegetable so necessary for the existence of moral policemen. "Come," say the states, "to these free lands and be restricted; enter these Austral paradises and be morally policed; bring your appetites and ambitions and cash with you, we will see that you shall not use them. If you have any individuality leave it behind. The State is your shepherd, you shall not want. The State's moral surgeons will remove every trace of backbone for you without pain, and thus shall you keep alive the glorious traditions of your sainted forefathers. If you have ideas, leave them behind. They interfere with organised labor. You shall be made moral by Act of Parliament, and your children shall be taught that selfhelp is out of date." In all these lands there will someday exist new Parliaments, whose business will be to reorganise the law and to make confusion worse confounded. In the future, as in the past, it will be laid down that the only moral guides worth listening to are a party majority in any parliament. It will be recognised that no good can come out of any legislator who does not swear fealty in the lobby to a dogma he privately disbelieves. If, to return to the original text, the faithful few had not been led into a lobby on the moral string of a party leader, it would not have been illegal for a "citizen to cart his furniture after dark. The moral policing of a nafion, therefore, depends entirely on the number of men—a wofully small percentage of the people—who trapse into a lobby when the crack of the whip is heard. It is clear that one faithful political follower may be the means of placing on the statute book a measure at which the whole world laughs, but which the citizen who is trapped under it fails to see is humorous. If politicians would hesitate for a few years to exhibit their appalling cleverness in devising new schemes for public irritation, the nations would have more time to get on with their work, instead of being engaged much of the time dodging the moral policemen who are engaged in leaving human nature exactly as they found it.