INDECENT LITERATURE.

Inangahua Times, Volume X, Issue 1608, 2 October 1885, Page 2

INDECENT LITERATURE.

! [^'AM-ANCJI H SKALD]. The publication iv this colony of the , sickening revelation of the vice of I London, in the Pall Mall Gazotte, is, Iwe think, a gross broach of the law, and ha 3 no redeeming feature to be urged in its favour. The harm such vile stui! may do, nay will do, to the morals of the yonth of the colony can- ! not be over estimated, and we trust the j Government will put a stop to the i scattering broadcast through New | Zealand of a class of literature totally i unfitted for publication ; if it does not. ' we shall have some of the purveyors of ! thisel iss of j oni-nu! istin g.irbage reporti ing ca-sr-s in full, which have hitherto been heud either with closed doors or merely reporterl in a f>rm stripped of all baneful details. I: it is allowable to reprint arid eiivnli'e the Pill Mull Gazette horrors out Here, and poison the moral atmosphere of the colony, there would be no valid excuse for i putting down the fill reporting of these cases in our Courts, which, so far. have escaped the enterprise of certain journals whose conductors have gone Wry far towards lowering the tone of the press in New Zealand. The dan L'.-r is one that threatens to pollute the j very foundations of social purity, and parents will have to exercise a sharp censorship of the press, and preveut their children from getting possession of pipers whose columns are prostituted to the lowest depths by the greed of those who seek to gain money by catering for the prurient and debased. In this colony the newspap-r has hitherto been iiee'.y given to the hoys and girls of the family to peruse as a j well conducted means of spreading j information and education, and it < liehows every decent minded person to sternly repress any attempt to pollute this strenu of knowledge. P.il lie opinion alone ought to stamp j this iii w departure in journalism out at ■ once, and the Government should see I tint the printing and publishing of hideously n: lerent details of vice, either in Kn^and or tvarer home, are not carried on unpunished. The liberty of the press is one thing, and the gross abuse of it another. The people, who publish these filthy cases out here pretend to be moralists, and say they do so to mike vice repugnant to those they i iduce to buy their papers, but they overlook Pope's lines : — "Vice- ia a monster of so frightful mien, Aa to be hated, need* but to be neon ;

Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, c We first c ndure. then pity, then embrace. " < and seek to mike their roarlors fa ni'iar ' with things they cannot b; the better I for reading about, and may be irre- j trievably contaminated by the too < fvmiliar knowledge that such things | exist. i