Mow Criminals are Made.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XVII, Issue 5461, 17 December 1892, Page 1

Mow Criminals are Made.

A writer in the Napier News says : "To be sent away "for seven years for stealing a handful of gooseberries." That's a pretty stiff sentence, you think 1 So do I ; but before I wholly condemn the sentence, let me say that a Magistrate is hard put to it to know what to do with these small boys. Remember, it wasn't the first time the youngster had made his bow to the Court. You hold that the parents should be held account able ? There's a good deal in that I grant you ; but we want a law making it a criminal offence for small boys or girls to be out after a certain hour at night unless in the keeping of parent or guardian. It's the nightly prowling of the streets that causes all the trouble, and leads to all the evil after-consequences. I don't think it a good thing to send one or two boys to an industrial reformatory for stealing a handful of gooseberries ; but I've great faith in whipping. The bigger boys were whipped you will say. But what was their punishment ? Six strokes with a birch rod. Humbug ; a parcel of humbug ! A round dozen across the shoulders with a good stout cane, and they would have had something to remember the incident by. You say that the parents should be included in the whipping ? I've no objection. Some people seek to excuse the parents, and say that some children are naturally vicious. I say it's a beastly falsehood, and is told by those who ought to be ashamed to try and cast the blame of their offsprings' wrongdoing upon poor misguided children. There never yet was a child born into this world but could be properly trained and brought up respectably and decently. The real fact is that parents will not take the trouble. They turn the children out of an evening, " to get rid of them and have the house quiet." Just so ; and then is sown the seeds of evil which show themselves so soon afterwards, and the parents find out when it is too late, that their youngsters are beyond control. God help this colony if we hadn't a national system of education. There would be many more boys and girls who would run wild. Our State nurseries where the children are packed off to—sometimes before they are five years of age—have prevented many hundreds from going, I believe, to the devil headlong. "It's not for me to say that the boys who were sent: away from Napier over the gooseberry business to Burnham should or should not bo liberated in a few months' time. That's a matter that needs very careful consideration. What lam concerned about is the fate of the boys who are left in Napier still-bent on evil courses. If I were a rich man I would start an institute for boys, and take up the training the parents neglect. But, there, you will call me an old fool for unbending as I have done. I believe I.am, after all.