The Wairarapa Daily. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 27, 1889. SOCIAL PURITY.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume X, Issue 3164, 27 March 1889, Page 2

The Wairarapa Daily. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 27, 1889. SOCIAL PURITY.

Last week a Social Purity Society was formed at Ohristchurch, and as the city of the plains may in this enterprise find imitators in different parts of the Colony, it may be worth while to consider what tho new crusade really means, Ohristchurch may perhaps be congratulated upon the possession of some dozen residents who can wear the white flower of a blameless life, and are ready at a moments notice to man a Social Purity Committee, though doubtless many of them are gentlemen of mature years in whom the fires of youth are spent, and to whom tho practice of all the virtues cornea easy, Tho basis on which the Ohristchurch Society is being formed appears to be a secular ono although its leading and more active members are ministers of religion, It might have been thought that the maintenance of Social purity could, in the larger centres of population, have been left very much in the hands of clergymen, but, unfortunately, the moral control over the young, which in days of old was exercised by the village vicar or parish priest, is now almost lost, and the youth in the latter part of the nineteenth century are deaf to the voice of the preacher. So to give a Social Purity Society a chance to live, it is necessary to dissociate it from religion! The Society is supposed to be a body banded together to show that social purity is possible and not unmanly. We fancy that the fast young men of New Zealand will probably admit these premises, the difficulty, of course being get them to act upon them. They will not do so, we fear, because certain elderly well-meaning gentlemen form a little mutual admiration society and style it by the name of "social purity." If the young men would only lay down rules of some liind for. themselves there would be some hope of a better standard of morality amongst them, Nor must it be forgotten that society generally is responsible for the great tolerance it frequently displays in the colonies towards vice covered by a very thin veneer, We do not think the Christohurch society will do harm, because the mere fact of its pointing a finger at a social sore here and there will tend to awaken a more

healthy moral feeling in the community. It hopes to run a crusade againstimpure literature and indecent photographs, but its' success in any movement of this kind is extremely doubtful. It has not, perhaps, yet grasped the difficulties it has to encounter and the best methods of dealing with them, but the honest attempt being made, even though it fail, will impress the public mind and create some sympathy for the cause. It is something to have the fact announced from a public platform that the social standard of the colony is a low ono, and after a time it may he possible to raise it.

_ Thero are in Victoria thirty-six irrigaion truata, on which 12,200,000 has >een invested.