The Cat With the Nine Tails.

Observer, Volume XV, Issue 821, 22 September 1894, Page 2

The Cat With the Nine Tails.

Mr Northcboft hates loafers, even as a certain elderly gentleman is said to hate holy water, and he never loses an opportunity of pointing a moral when he gets such an individual as Patrick Casey before him. Casey, a young fellow, well known in Onehunga, was charged at the Police Court on Saturday with deserting his three children. The evidence of the wife was to the effect that her husband cleared out about eighteen months ago and had never written her a line since. She had repeatedly written to him but her letters remained unanswered. In consequence of his desertion she had had to rely upon charitable aid, and get along as best she could.

And then Mr Northcroft proceeded to ' talk ' to Mr Casey. ' A great number of you men,' said the S.M., ' have no more feeling for your wives and children than the beasts and the birds. As long as you get what you want yourselves you don't care whether your children starve.' His Worship went on to say that the Charitable Aid Board only made matters worse by helping such men to shift the responsibility of supporting their wives and families on to the charitable public. 'It seems to me,' said Mr Northcroft, ' that it would serve you right if the Legislature passed a law by which such men as you who shirk your responsibilities for any other reason than ill-health, could be flogged.'

Whereat Mr Patrick Casey looked very much surprised. He was ordered to pay for the support of his children, to enter into sureties that he would do so, and was told that if he failed he would get two months with hard labour at Mount Eden. I hope this case may be a warning to the lazy, thriftless, selfish loafers who, in Mr Northcroft's own words, 'are lower than the animals ' to mend their ways. Unhappily when these men are fined or are sent to gaol it is the unfortunate wives and children they have abandoned who are the principal sufferers. Pines they seldom pay, and their enforced retirement to Mount Eden for two or three months is not in the least calculated to benefit their unhappy belongings. Far better would it be if such worthless fellows were soundly flogged, as Mr Northcroft suggests, and allowed to go. A. taste of the cat would have more terrors for them than all the fining and imprisonment in the world.