MR JUDKINS PROPHETIC
“TRINITY OF EVILS”
“Police Administration, Purity, Reformers, and
Critics,” was the subject to which Mr Judkins addressed
himself at the
Collingwood Mission yesterday.
Mr Judkins was received with applause. He said
that it seemed to
him that a new crisis was approaching in our national life similar to
that of four years
ago. A fact that showed that headway was being made was when
opposition was
aroused. Evil was not accustomed to making a disturbance unless
it was hurt.
Social Reformers were attacking some social evils, the trinity of
evils, drink, gambling
and impurity, that existed everywhere in civilised communities. Some of
the churches had
become interested in social reform of late years, because they could
not help it if they
did not want to fall behind. It was rather amusing that the head
of the police
department should say that there was no gambling school in
Melbourne, and then get
information a day or two later that certain people had to “move
on.”
Private citizens ought not to be called on to inspect the gambling dens
of the city, but
if a huge department insisted there was nothing wrong, and would not do
its work, private
citizens had to make investigations. In one of the gambling dens
he had visited in
disguise, two or three Sundays ago, there were a hundred men in a room
crowded with tables
that were loaded with money. In another den there were 60 men,
and he could have
gone to 14 other places. That could not be called a small scale,
surely! Yet they
were told that there was nothing of the kind going on, but these people
must be very
dense, or were keeping there eyes closed.
It was a serious thing when charges were made
against a responsible
officer, and he held his tongue. Social reformers were
going on. With a
friend he went to another place, and saw things that he was not going
to talk about
that afternoon. One minister had said that he had not seen this
sort of thing
and it did not exist. A friend of Mr Judknis’s had a remedy for
this state of
affairs that was like putting a sticking-plaster on a volcano. This
friend considered that
the trouble was due to economic causes. The idea that impurity
was caused by
economic conditions was ridiculous. It had been said that he
wanted all the people
arrested who were found in the parks after 9 o’clock. (Laughter)
That was too
ridiculous to contradict. The parks should not be shut up, but
ought to be made fine
respectable places, to which anybody would be glad to take his wife and
children.
(Applause)
Remarkable testimony to the lax administration of
the Police department
had been given that week by the liquor trade itself. It was
reported that at the
last meeting of the hotelkeepers, Mr Opitz had said that if the
Police did their
duty, they would find 30 or 40 women coming out of sly grog shops, and
that Mr Judkins had
told the truth for once. Now he did not say that, and not know
that such an awful
state of things existed. He had heard that there was a room
attached to hotels
called “the morgue,” where drunken men were put to sleep off
their
debauch. The only way a publican could put down drunkenness was
to shut up shop.
(Applause) Legislation was necessary to cure drunkenness.
Another important
thing in furthering social reform was that referred to in “The
Argus” of
Saturday, the building-up of character and the influence of the home
spirit.
From THE ARGUS 29th August 1910 page 7
