A Boy Murderer in Victoria. Extraordinary Youthful Depravity.

Waikato Times, Volume XVII, Issue 1405, 5 July 1881, Page 2

A Boy Murderer in Victoria. Extraordinary Youthful Depravity.

A story almost- we wish it were quite — incredible is told in the daily papers. At Scarsdale, in Victoria, two boys went out shooting. One, a Chinese lad, accidentally received a charge in the leg, to the alarm of his companion, who attempted, with his sistsr's aid, to bandage the wounded limb. While thus engaged, his elder brother appeared upon the scene, and with an atrocious readiness of resource, perfectly horrifying in its coolness, deliberately cut the little sufferer's throat with his penknife, and threw the body into a neighbouring Wdterhole. At least, so says his younger brother. The tragedy only came to light through the accidental discovery of the remains. The companion of the murdered boy, aged ten yeaia, then made the above disclosure. The tale is dreadful enough to be original, but our readers will easily recall an alleged kindred incident which happened some short time since in the Blue Mountains. In that case it was reported that a mere child had been secretly made away with by his own brother, under somewhat similar circumstances. Appalling as is the first instance of juvenile depravity, therefore it is apparently not altogether unique of its kind. Depravity, indeed, seems quite an inadequate term to express the state of miud which could prompt such a diabolical deed. There would appear to be a fiendish heartles«ness — a complete callousness of hensibility among that portion of our colonial youth of which the sample under notice is, we fearfully hope, a grossly exaggerated type. Certainly our social machinery for reaching and influencing the rising generation is defective. To have hardened to such a degree as a cold-blooded atrocity of this kind betokens, is to own a state of mind inaccessible to any boft or refining influence, and impervious to any delicacy of sentiment or gentleness of impulse. It discloses a crude coarseness and positive brutality of life and manners which could only be engendered amid scenes of blood — the product of a shamble or slaughter-yard, in fact, rather than any possible effect of civilised home growth. Surely the faintest touch of nature — the feeblest promptings of boyish generosity or youthful tenderness, would have asseited itself in the juvenile murderer's mind, had it existed, to save his helpless victim. Its blank, utter absence in, however, the appalling and only inference. There is too much reason to fear that the sensibilities of the growing element amongst us are too much neglected, and permitted to run hideously wild. — Sydney Bulletin.