Pigeon-Plucking.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume V, Issue 624, 23 June 1891, Page 2

Pigeon-Plucking.

[AUCKLAND STAR.] Tin oise of Rae v. Greenway is ended at last. The plaintiff when weighed in the balance by Hla Honor waa found wanting, but threr-fourtha of the jury returned a verdict in his favor for rather more than half the amount aued for. Mr Rse therefore vanishes from the record with soiled hands and £248 in solid cash representing some money lent and a considerable amount of second-hand jewellery trucked off. To judge such a case on its merits is next to impossible. Where witnesses oontradiot themselves and each other so unblnshingly, jurors ate necessarily guided chiefly by the light of nature, and any verdict is largely the result 01 guesswork. Indeed. His Honor'e remarks seemed calculated rather to impress upon the jury the necessity ot taking the moral measure ot the witnesses than ot relying on the bare letter of their evidence. The admonition was not unheeded, for a more flyblown lot than some ot the witnesses have never appeared in a court ot justice. Tbe happy family convicted themselves out of their own mouths. They are proved adepts at pigeon-pluoking. It is not necessary to depict them in darker colors than they have represented themselves; indeed black paint would be lost on them. In one respect the prostitutes compare favorably with some of the other witnesses, for they openly avow their shame and make no pretence other than that their wretched victim waa almost habitually in a state of drunkenness and imbecility.

But, indeed, there is hardly a redeeming faature in the wretched story. Our readers who have waded through the disgusting details will have no difficulty in seeing that the unfortunate Greenway was plundered alike by avowed prostitutes or under the guise of friendship and the cant of wholesome advice. It is a melancholy fact that under the shadow of churches, and almost within earshot of coteries purring about social purity, a drunken imbecile surrounded by unscrupulous men and abandoned women can month after month join in wild orgies at brothels which rear their stately fronts in the face of heaven, which make no pretence to be anything else but houses of ill fame, and which the police seem powerless to suppress, although their existence is patent to every school-boy in the city. As for Greenway himself, the less said about him the better, He was not a born fool, for be bad intellectual capacity enough to graduate in arts, and to qualify himself to praotise as a barrister. He is one of the many examples in the colonies of the little power inherited wealth has to benefit a man unless hie moral faculties are developed by training that keeps pace with his financial expectations. It he had been obliged to work bard to earn a crust, he might have been a decent average citizen. There is not much room for pity for a career which seems to have been dominated by selfishness. If a man plays the role of pigeon, he will soon find himself in the olutches of hawks. But the most cynical oan hardly fail to regret that a man who is respectably connected should become a companion of tbe most worthless members of society, and that his name instead of being associated with the duties of good citizenship can never be mentioned by his friends without a feeling of degradation and shame,