A WIDOW'S SENTENCE.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 24, 5 March 1914, Page 7

A WIDOW'S SENTENCE.

MENTION IN HOUSE OF LORDS. "Times" and "Sydney Sun" Services. ; LONDON, March 4. In the House of Lords the Earl of Selbourne referred to the recent imprisonment of a widow charwoman, as tMr result of a charge laid by the Society for the Protection of Children. He said he was informed that the children .were well fed.-. The mother was earning 10/-, a week, and could afford to buy clothes to send the children to school. She knew that the discovery meant a proseeution for overcrowding' and' also the' separation; of .her children, of whom she was fond. If this were true, said the speaker, it was a most piteous case. - The Archbishop of Canterbury contended that the law did hot compel the Board of Guardians to break up homes..' ; '

[Last week a cable message stated that the woman referred to had been sentenced to six months' imprisonment for cruelly neglecting three children. They occupied a dark, cheerless,' and stinking room in Clerkenwell, and the children were said to be ill-clad, starvingj and bordering on idiocy. They wei'e being fe'd on broken victuals which the woman took home. The magistrate who sentenced her described the case as being one of medisaval barbarity.]