MR JUDKINS DISGUISED
"SOUL SHUDDERING IMMORALITY"
More was said by Mr WH Judkins at Wesley
Church,
Lonsdale-street, yesterday about the administration of our laws,
especially those
relating to gambling. When the administration was lax the
criminal was helped.
Members of the police force were set to do all sorts of small things -
to catch boys
playing football in the streets and to hunt after people with no
lights at the back
of their motor-cars, but the big things, the great social sins of
society, were
neglected by the Police department. The gambler, the sly
grog-seller, the licensed
victualler who sold after hours, and the keeper of the house of
ill-fame were all
helped. Gambling, Sunday trading, and immorality were rife, and
those who should be
sweeping these things away were kept at little fiddling things.
The chiefs of the department, continued Mr Judkins,
said, “Where
is the wrong? Show us.” That was the work of the
department. He could
take the chief commissioner down the street and show him place after
place where the law
was being flagrantly disregarded. Mr Graham, one of the
State Ministers, had
been putting his oar in. It would have been a great deal better
if he had kept it
out. What would Mr Graham call a man who was in a position to
administer the law,
and knew of the existence of wrong, but did not enforce the law?
What Mr Graham said
did not matter a fig. But if the government were to insist
upon wrong being
cleared out, they, private individuals, would not have to speak out as
they were doing
here. Our laws make it illegal for people to keep gaming
houses. There were in
Melbourne Chinese lottery shops, fan-tan shops, and shops where
lottery tickets were
sold to Europeans too. Did the police know of it?
A Voice - Of course they do.
Mr Judkins - If so, why were the keepers not
prosecuted? If the
police did not know, they ought to be ashamed of themselves, and our
detective force did
not know the A B C of detective work. (Applause) Last Sunday
night he had gone in
disguise so complete that not even his own father would have known him,
into two Chinese
gambling dens right in the heart of Melbourne. He had taken the
precaution of
being able to get in, and he passed the guards at the door
without question.
He stood with the gamblers at the tables, saw the men playing and
saw all that went
on. He could have gone into 14 other places of the same
character. So if he, a
private citizen, of no great physical strength and without any
great force of the
law behind, had been able to do that, why could not the Police
department do it? If
he had had with him two men of only the same size as himself he could
have raided the
whole of the places. (applause) He had every reason to believe
the departmental
heads did know of the things he spoke of. Yet the places were not
raided. He
wondered what the chief police commissioner would have to say about
this. They saw
that the work was grossly neglected. From the gambling shops he
and a friend had
gone elsewhere, and there had seen so much open immorality that it had
made their souls
shudder; immorality of so fearful a character as to make one wonder
whether, in
comparison with modern Melbourne, Sodom and Gomorrah had
not been highly moral
places. If the police did their duty they could put a stop to
most of this. At any
rate, they could arrest hundreds of men and women on a charge of
offensive behaviour, if
on no other charge. In this campaign they were not saying
anything against the
individual members of the police force, who had to subordinate
themselves to a
system. At the door of the chief police commissioner lay the
blame. In some
respects our law was as badly administered as in any civilised country
in the word.
(Applause)
From THE ARGUS 15th August 1910 page 6