EVERYBODY'S.

Taranaki Daily News, 31 August 1917, Page 6

EVERYBODY'S.

LAST NIGHT, "WHERE ARE MY CHILDREN*" .. iio picture which id being produced in New 'Hymoutli under this title la what the little ones would call ''nasty medicine." It is calculated to make people think. It will probably makb .them think hard, and variously. The most obvious lesson it conveys is, of course, that it pays to be good, also that the way of the transgressor is hard. But there is more than that in it. If the picture is anything beyond a device for harrowing people's feelings at so much a sitting it is an indictment of our social system. Virtue, it seems, still resides amongst the poor and lowly —when it resides at all —but the tendency of riches is to harden the heart and toughen the conscience. Luxury, selfishness and lieartlessness are commonly supposed to go hand in hand, and there is no doubt that that is largely the case. Opulence plays liavoc with the social conscience. The nemises of the wealthy parvenu is too often reprobate ' sons, 'and dissolute (laughters. But there is another side of the picture. Vice is not created wholly by extreme wealth. It attaches also to extreme poverty. In the great cities of the world tlio children of the poor are marked from birth as the victims of profligacy and mental and moral degradation. In the kennels of the cosmopoli chastity cannot reside. In the slums the children "die like flies." It is the perpetual hideous tragedy of the poor, the classes and the masses. To-night will positively be the last opportunity of seeing this sensational picture tmd .to-morrow, Saturday night, it will he shown at Waitara. The box plan is at Colliers.'