Alexandra Times at KellyGang 25/9/1875
THE GOBUR DRAMATIC ENTERTAINMENT
(To the Editor of the Alexandra Times)
Sir, - Mr Johnson’s lugubrious wail about my having said a pot of beer would procure at thousand such votes as his, must be very amusing to your readers. That the statement is pretty correct, and that the estimate of Johnson has been made with mathematical exactness, is, sufficiently evinced by the ribaldry and scurrility displayed by him in his letter to the Times of Saturday last. His letter, bristling with falsehood from beginning to end, is so thoroughly characteristic of the man that it will readily be seen he has been well nursed in the “hotbeds of falsehood and deceit." The man's anxious soul seems sorely perplexed with the beery bugbear of his own creation. I was not aware of him having made any allusions to the effect of "a pot of beer," until reading Johnson's letter. Johnson must be suffering from 1 some mental disease, or he must be laboring ? ? influence? which make men see double, else he would not impute to me what I never wrote. What I did state in my letter was “a pot of beer would procure a thousand such votes of censure of his;” and since the publication of his letter his votes of censure have fallen so low in commercial value that a thousand of such votes now would hardly realize a pot of good beer. Poor troubled soul, thou shalt enjoy thy beer in peace, so that as I am concerned.
Referring to the remarks relative to the "rising generation," it certainly would be a blur on our state system if the lads now occupying our school when grown into manhood should be found to be no improvement upon W Johnson. It in the instruction of youth, teachers aim at no higher standard of moral excellence than that which seem to satisfy such men as Johnson, then verily, "the black-bone and spinal marrow of our social system" will become rotten at the core moral’ turpitude, and acts that mar the grace and blush of modesty would become virtues of the highest order. Had I hope under our national system a generation of honorable men and women will, spring up, having unswerving principles of honor and purity of action - a generation that will show virtue its own loveliness, vice its own hideonness - a generation promising all the attributes that ennoble and dignify the character of man, making himself truly God's 'noblest work.’
When a man like Johnson assumes the role of a moralist, truly the height of the ridiculous has been reached. Being a teacher of youth, I am sensibly alive to the responsibilities attaching to that high office. And I take this opportunity of informing W Johnson that there are some not so far distant as the next generation, who have been well "nursed in hotbeds of falsehood and deceit." If becoming such tricksters as those alluded to is what he calls a "truth-telling class," then good Lord deliver the rising generations ? ? such state of "truth-telling" 'Yours &c,
SAMUEL TOWN
Gobur, September 20, 1875.
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