The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News and the Morning News. SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 1873.

Auckland Star, Volume IV, Issue 882, 4 January 1873, Page 2

The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News and the Morning News.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 1873.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrongs that need resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that we can do.

The following letter treats of a subject that has recently been brought again before the public mind, and one that must be kept there until this wrong that needs resistance is repaired : —

Sir, —In your issue of last evening I notice that the debtors confined in Mount Eden, at the instance of remorseless creditors, have petitioned his Honor the Superintendent to allow them the 12s. paid by the detaining creditor for their detention. I feel satisfied that, if you take up the case on its proper merits, justice will be done, and the maintenance money paid to the proper legal authority, the unfortunate debtor, who, I maintain, is the proper person ; at all events such is the literal interpretation of the Act under which debtors are confined. Some two sessions ago, in the Provincial Council, attention was called to this matter on the motion (if I recollect right) of Mr Cadman. The result of his action in the matter was, that the Provincial Executive promised to take legal opinion on the matter, which was done, the late Mr Wynn and Mr Weston being the legal gen- . tlemen to whom the question was referred ; and their opinion|was, without question, that , the Government had no power to detain the allowance of 125., for which they charged some £6 odd. Of course the tax-payer had to pay it. I may add such is the abyss to which Provincial Governments are prosti- , tuted that though their Government consisted of no less than three legal gentlemen, I at their head T. B. Gillies, Esq., who prides ! himself, doubtless, on his legal acumen, the only way I see to try this much vexed question is to subscribe and appeal to the Supreme Court, and nrfake the Provincial Government disgorge mofaey which they receive under false pretei*6es. I will be most happy to gwe £1 Is towards it.—Yours, &c, A Citizen. '

Our readers need not to be told the Circumstances of tbe debtors' com-

plaint. 11l this New Zealand — I which We proudly call the Britain of | the South—and* in this hi.riotkenth century we punisli A man for being poor. It signifies nothing that he may have been made poor by the crime of others, or by circumstances as inevitable as the decrees of fate. We require but to know that he is poor, and we arm the vindictive creditor with power to throw the unfortunate man into gaol. "With one weight alone is the vengeance of the angry creditor burthened, and this not in mercy to the debtor, but to save expenses to the State. The detaining creditor is compelled to pay twelve shillings per Week for the food of the debtor, and it is this that the Provincial Oovernment, with a meanness unparalleled in the public business of New Zealand, slfezes with larcenous hand and virtually makes it a portion of provincial revenue. There is a paltriness about provincialism in its decadence that is very contemptible; but the dirtiest little piece of meanness that has yet defiled its fingers is this taking the bread out of the mouths of the unfortunate debtors and feeding them on criminals' fare. We have been often proud of our chivalrous Superintendent, leading in Wellington, year after year, the forlorn hope in the effort to abolish the barbarous anachronism of Imprisonment for Debt. We have read his spirit stirring pleadings for mercy to the man who may have committed no crime, but by our laws is torn away from his family and thrown into a cell at the very time when his family require his efforts to shield them from starvation. And yet it is this same champion of the rights of the imprisoned debtor that puts forth his hand and takes away the debtor's wholesome food, and for the miserable object of saving a few shillings a week to satisfy the craving maw of hungry provincial officers places on wretched prison fare men and women who all their lives have been accustomed at least to the comforts of ordinary life. It is a scandal to the province, and we are really astonished that Mr Gillies, who passes down South as the champion of the wrongfully imprisoned debtor, should allow such a stain on his administration within his own domain. The responsibility of this tyrannical and cruel treatment he cannot evade. He may have divided it with his Executive when trying to imitate parliamentary procedure in the farce of provincial responsible government ; but now that he has kicked over the traces, and taken the bit in his mouth, the entire responsibility will reßton himself. The debtors have now appealed to His Honor, and we are warranted in expecting that he will not, for the sake of the locusts that are eating up the green things of the province, turn a deaf ear to the cry of the poor prisoners undeservedly pining in the dungeon.