Wairarapa Daily Times. [ESTABLISHED 1878] TUESDAY, AUGUST 23, 1892. A COLONIAL RESPONSIBILITY.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XIII, Issue 4199, 23 August 1892, Page 2

Wairarapa Daily Times. [ESTABLISHED 1878]

TUESDAY, AUGUST 23, 1892. A COLONIAL RESPONSIBILITY.

bzino tub extended title of the Wairakata Daily, with which it. is IDSNTIOAt,

Tue Young Colonial is what we have made him; and we have not been careful in the manufacture. Is he lawless ? We gave him no notion of law or discipline when he wts a little child. Is ho given to gratifying self, 'without regard to the feelings of others ? From his earliest years he has seen us hurrying on in the race for success; he has read over and over again the motto that inspires our lives—the sentiment of the Miller on the Doe, "I care for nobody, no, not I; And nobody cares for me I" Is he wanting in affection ? We had no timo for that sort of thing, when the wonderful potentialities wrapped in the relation of father and son lay within our qrasp. There is an old-world story which is apposite enough to bear relating, A criminal stood in tho dock to receive sentence, Tho judge asked him of his youth, of his home, his father. "My father I" he passionately said," my father was always too busy to Bpeak to me, 'Runaway, my boy,' he used to say, ' and don't trouble me,' I have had no father." The father had been a Ejreat lawyer; bis treatise on Trusts became a standard authority, But the greatest trust of ull had slipped through his hands; his son had never been his concern,

De (e fahda narralur, wo should like to say to tho father of each colonial larrikin, You have sons and daughters; try to realise that they are children, that they look to you, that they are waiting for you to mould them. When you think of those young things who aro your own flesh and blood, take less account of their aioie commercial value as assistants in dragging the coach along. Give up treating them as though they were your equals in knowledge and under, standing; above all, put out of sight the notion of making the.ru early wa»eearuers. You are turning that which should be the garden spot of their lives into a dejerf; you show them only tho rough places, ypu pake their young liyes unlovely—and then ya» wonder that lliey have no graces of character, no amenities of disposition. They cannot get wliac you will not give. When did yoa teach them respect for their elders, or seemly reticence of speech, or obedience to duty without reference to consequences ? What lessons did you give your hoys in kindness to dumb animals, in generosity to the weak, in restraint of passion 1 In their most reeepti«fylais, they were watching you every day, How much instruction in the an of lying have you unconsciously put before them-or in sordid self-seeking, or in contempt for disagreeable restraint ? Bah! you are unreasonable; you expect the laws of the universe to be reversed in your favour, You saturate yonr children with the leaching of your example, more potent than precept because it is imbibed insensibly; and you wonder that the teaching bears fruit. What would you Jjave? grapes Jrom tens ? You jvjll, never get then], Hundreds of tho hoys and girls °f' the Colony grow lip in homes that are practically dominated by a single watchword -"Bach one for himself j and the deyil take jibe hindmost J" Hundreds of young men and women leave those homes witb the impress of that leaching upon them \ Hide health and high spirits invite tbem to all sorts of pastimes, and it is obvious that no restraining considerations about the well-being of others can bfl looked for when self clamouis to bo satisfied, What right, what reason, have we to expect young people to turn their backs upon, the only teachings that they bow of J

The Colony has, indeed, been bußily enpiged in sowing the wind; and the time is at hand when the Colony will

roap the whirlwind, For ourselves, we loathe the larrikin character of tho youth of New Zealand—conspiouous in its essence, though various in its manifestations, in every class of our colonial society. We abhor its indifference to suffering, its inanities, its lawless eelf-seebinp. But we detest still more the doctrine—the maxim of a prudent despair—that a Police Offences Act will be able to do the work whioh parents neglected; we desire to hold up to contempt the complacent blindness which is always ready to reprobate the " larrikin," in reality more sinned against than sinniug, And while we cannot help feeling that the generation of young men and women now growing ap possesses many characteristics of the simian type, we nevertheless take loave to suggest that there may ,be ways and mean? of coping with the downward tendency which distinguishes the youth of the Colony. Apart from, insistingon the primary responsibility of parents, something cfec will have to be done. It is certain that public opinion will presently dictate some course of action, some change from the existiug policy of laissez /aire. What that action should be, we decline to declare at this juncture. But this we will say, that if vim counsels prevail in this Colony it may yet come about that we shall have, in a fow years, no more legitimate source of satisfaction on the whole than the sight of Our Boys