TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Manawatu Standard, Volume 9138, Issue 9138, 10 February 1910, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

While the Borough Council is considering the bye-laws at its The special meeting to-night Cycle the question of making a Track, new regulation dealing with the. cycle track should receive attention. By the judgment of Mr Thomson, which appears to be a perfectly sound exposition of the law, the section of the Municipal Corporations Act cannot be made to exclude motor cyclists from the track to the Esplanade. The track was constructed solely for the use of cyclists propelling their own machines, but the Council under the existing law has no power to reserve the convenience for them, and motorists are at liberty to make a speedway of the track to the undoubted danger of those for whom it was made. A special bye-law is required to specifically reserve the track for the cyclists proper, and the Council should seize the opportunity of embodying this necessary regulation in its bye-laws.

In a report to the Dunedin Society for Prison Reform special * Offences reference is made to the against successful working of Society. Juvenile Courts, especially in that city. The legislation which devised a new system for the hearing of charges against children has already proved its value, and may rank as the most important of the social enactments of late years. In Dunedin much gratification is felt with the manner in which the Juvenile Courts are conducted, the sympathetic and kindly disposition of Magistrate Widdowson haying the effect of directing the thoughts of youthful offenders into right channels and impressing upon them the benefit of a straightforward and honourable career. There is no doubt that the lengthy period the Dominion was without Juvenile Courts has had a harmful effect upon Society as a whole. The Dunedin Star states the position ably when it says that every man of reading and experience, every person who has made it his or her business to take an intelligent interest in that which goes on in the world around them, knows beyond question that the association of the child with evil-living, foul-6peaking, and criminally disposed adults has too frequently transformed what might have proved reasonably good citizens into moral pests—a curse to themselves and to society. The creation of Juvenile Courts has appreciably remedied the more obviously preventable dangers of contamination. The child who has stolen apples, or .plucked flowers, or broken a window 3 or is beyond control, is no longer legally associated with adult offenders in varying stages of vice and criminality.