The Tuapeka Times - Wednesday, May 29, 1895

TUAPEKA TIMES
AND GOLDFIELDS REPORTER AND ADVERTISER.

The orgie of horrors which the Wilde trial in London provided is happily over, the principal and one of his brutish associates receiving a sentence of two years' hard labor each—a sentence totally inadequate, as the judge declared, to the dastardly nature of the offence. One of the features of the trial was the attempt of Wilde to justify some of his writings by ascribing to the necessities of "art" what was in reality filth—the ordure of an ineffably foul and loathsome imagination. It would be vain to hope that the removal of Wilde from the sphere of his crimes against Nature and morality will have the effect of extirpating the form of vice of which he has been found guilty. Similar trials at various periods in London during the last score of years tend to show that society in that great city is as hopelessly corrupt as it was during the worst period of the Roman Empire. In fact, the very forms of vice known to have been prevalent among the leisured classes of Rome in its most luxurious days appear to have reproduced themselves among the same class in the Modern Babylon to-day. Idleness and high living are the chief causes of this moral degeneracy, as well, perhaps, as certain mental and moral deformities which are transmitted through families, among whom for long periods there has been a low standard of morals, no sense of self-restraint and no right understanding of the duties of life and the responsibilities of wealth and position. We have such instances in the Queensberrys and the Ailesburys and other decadent families of rank among the British nobility of our day. Such men are a disgrace to their class, and a constant menace to morality. The Marquis of Queensberry, himself a man of questionable tastes and wild and eccentric habits, is the father of the Lord Alfred Douglas, a creature of feeble character and debilitated mind, and seemingly with no particular ideas of either life or morality. But this is scarcely a matter for surprise when his family history and antecedents are considered. As for this creature Wilde, it is scarcely possible even to speak of him without a feeling of nausea. He has posed for many years as the apostle of "culture." And all the time he was a beast at heart. Even in the witness-box his superb airs did not desert him. he was at the outset magnificently insolent in his replies to counsel. He tried to justify his views of morality, or rather he sought to justify his contention that there is no such thing as morality. He had previously sought to justify it in other fashions by plays that would never have been permitted upon decent stages if what is known as "society" was not in a condition of absolute moral putrefaction. He seems to have made paradoxical epigram and insolent immorality his professions, and he seems also to have acquired distinction and money by such a prostitution of his gifts. There is some consolation in the fact that the wretched creature has been found out, and the grossness of the public that not only tolerated but feted him made apparent to the world. The exposure may lead to the repression of the decadent literature of the day of which "new women" as well as corrupt men are the creators, and so destroy an influence which must have a tendency to sap public morality.