Sydney Evening News - Saturday, April 6, 1895

We yesterday had some comment upon a Disorderly Conduct Suppression now under discussion in the Legislative Council. The Disorderly Conduct Suppression Bill deals with the riotous behaviour of the lowest kind of street roughs for whose offences there may often, on the ground of neglected bringing up, be some explanation if not excuse. From the result of a peculiarly horrible case just concluded in London it would appear that there needed the stern attention of the law to the proceedings of persons who have not been neglected in their youth, but who on the contrary have enjoyed every advantage. Oscar Wilde, the son of distinguished parents, the father known all over Europe as an oculist, the mother enjoying considerable literary reputation, has just ignominiously lost, before a jury, a case by which he sought to clear himself of a charge of having been guilty of a series of horrible offences. This is by no means the first case of the kind that has occurred in the British Islands among people who should from their birth be regarded as belonging to the best order of society. The memory of the Dublin scandal and the Cleveland-street scandal rises up in connection with this unpleasant subject. It is not too much to say that if the cat could be laid upon some of the people who have rendered themselves notorious by these orgies it would never in its long history have been better applied. If the prospect of attention thus being further called to their ignominy caused any of them to hang themselves, there would be no great loss. That Wilde has been, so to speak, knocked out by the Marquis of Queensberry renders his defeat and disgrace the more complete. If the Marquis had been a peculiarly strait-laced personage there might have been a lingering idea that he had distorted and misinterpreted some really innocent acts. But the Marquis is emphatically not a person of this kind. He has rendered himself somewhat notorious, and caused himself to be looked at somewhat askance by typical British respectability by his patronage of the ring, by his freethinking opinions, and by his contempt for conventionalities, a contempt notably shared, by the way, by his well-known sister, Lady Florence Dixie. That a man as befits a connection clear of 'Old Q' of any suspicion of squeamishness should have exposed Oscar Wilde renders the exposure more damning. It too shows the sad deterioration that has taken place in even the habits of the fast man. The Marquis may possibly be considered a survival of the epoch when Tom and Jerry, Bob Logic and Corinthian Tom, saw life in London. But from the robust rowdyism of those 'bloods' to the Wilde horrors is a fearful falling off.