Social and economic opinions March 23, 1895.

*THE WORKER*

Brisbane, March 23, 1895.

Open Column.

For the expression of social and economic

opinions with which the “Worker” does not

necessarily hold itself in complete accord.

Compulsory Education for Men.

NEED FOR EDUCATION.

In these days it is acknowledged as a truism that every child should be educated, for the money so spent lessons the amount spent on prisons and police. It seems to have escaped our notice that a similar amount of money spent on adults might save much money spent on fictitious wants, on stupid legislation and on political log-rolling. Carlyle considered men as mostly fools, the hundredth being a knave. But even the majority of the ninety-nine would be knaves had nature not denied them the necessary amount of brains, for their motives are selfish and knavish at bottom.

RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES.

When the adult male is granted a political vote, and conjugal and paternal rights, it is evident that with these rights come certain responsibilities and duties. Men clamour loudly enough for the former but neglect the latter. How lightly and unthinkingly they take on themselves the determining of the constitution of a country, its social welfare, and the rearing of the coming race, as if all these were trivial things, an error which it was so easy to rectify!

SOME NEEDED REFORMS.

When men take on any of these rights they should be instructed in their carrying out. We would then not see a hoodwinked mob triumphantly placing a corrupt politician – a mere time server – at the head of the poll; no longer see children sickly and idiotic through their parents' ignorance of conjugal laws; no longer see ill-trained and neglected children; no longer see economic panaceas founded on partial data, nor heartless defence of existing abuses as unavoidable.

TIME!

How can the man, busied all day in earning bread, find time to study subjects so intricate as to puzzle the wisest? Tired he comes home, and rest he must have, The only remedy to cease expending so much national energy on fictitious and injurious wants, and to compel men, if necessary, to devote the time saved to study of political, social, conjugal and parental duties.

MORE LIGHT!

The money at present wasted in war material, in drink, in luxuries, and in strikes could be devoted to establishing colleges and professorships of politics, economics, conjugal and parental education, and a course of instruction should be as compulsory for each adult as is a term of military service on each German citizen.

ABDIEL.

Immoral Rampaging.

In the Brisbane Telegraph of the 23^rd ultimo were two leaderettes written in a style which, though not unprecedental or infrequent in the daily press, is yet so frequent in the paper named as to be somewhat characteristic of it. That style consists in the brazen assertion of “half-truths,” and a deduction from them of arguments and inferences as though they were whole truths and axiomatic facts: whereas those arguments and inferences, if connected with the other halves of the half-truths, would convey a quite opposite significance from what is intended and implied by the writer. The first of the articles referred to is headed “Moral Rampaging,” and it is intended as a rebuke to Mr. Justice Windeyer for his having “severely rated a husband for extraordinary cruelty to his wife,” in a recent case in Sydney in which the wife sued for and obtained a decree of divorce on grounds of cruelty and adultery from her husband, a clergyman; and it is also intended as a pseudo justification of the rev,. Ruffian, upon the somewhat inconsistent pleas of his insanity, and his “devotion to his work as a clergyman.”

Then the moralising Telegraph proceeds, “The moralising judge should have rated the wife for marrying such a man, or her friends for allowing her to do so,” thus trying to make out that even the judge, the wife, and her friends were blameworthy, but “the poor man”- the rev. ruffian – was an object of pity. “It says a great deal for him, and for the religious tone of his parish that his church used usually to be crowded.” The pair had only been married just twelve months, and it came out in evidence that the rev. hub cruelly ill-treated the wife for half that time, so much so that the judge properly expressed “disgust” at the conduct of the rev. “poor man.” The latter used to mesmerise and hypnotise the wife, called her “a d – d wretch,” tore her hair out of her head, kicked her along the ground, etc., and behaved with amorous “indecency” to her sister.

Readers will remember how often and how long it has been the custom for editors of the daily press – both here and at home – to animadvert with scathing satire, or with crucial condemnation and anathema, the savageness, cruelty, ruffianism, barbarity, etc., of any poor man or labouring man who was convicted of having “kicked” his wife “with his hob-nailed boots,” or otherwise cruelly ill-used her; and how it was always represented as though each offence of the kind was the peculiar vice, crime, or sin of “the horny-handed, great unwashed ruffians,” etc.

In the numerous cases illustrating proof to the contrary, where the perpetrator of infamous cruelty to a wife or servant girl has been a clergyman or monied man the dialectic resources of the daily press editor are exhausted in pleas to justify or extenuate the conduct of the offender.

Just so, if the rev. Mr. Clarke – the pitied hero of the divorce case is the subject of the divorce case that is the subject of the Telegraph article in censure of Mr. Justice Windeyer – had been a labouring man and a lay preacher besides, one can fancy how the D.T. And other daily papers would have praised the judge for expressing his “disgust” at the cruelty of the “savage ruffian with hob-nailed boots,” and then have proceeded in this vein; “As to the plea of insanity, that is all moonshine; he was only temporarily insane, as any man can make himself to be either with alcohol, or by giving full vent to his sexual lust or other evil passions, as was the case with Bertrand and Deeming. A term in gaol, with periodic floggings, would soon have knocked such insanity out of the preaching ruffian. As to the crowded congregations – doubtless mostly fools – that attended the chapel he preached at, this only aggravates the iniquity of the cruel brute, as showing that he wilfully acted in contravention of the Bible which he must have been familiar with. It showed, in fact, that he was only trading on morality and religion; that he was a New South Wales edition of Mr. Wragge, 'the Rogue' in Wilkie Collin's novel of 'No Name,' who thus defined himself; Swindler! Yes, I am a swindler; a man who cultivates the field of human sympathy. I am that moral agriculturist.' ” There are many more moral and religious agriculturists besides Collin's Rogue “Wragge” and Mr. Clarke who cultivate the field of human sympathy.

TALLY-HO, Barcoo.