A CRYING SHAME.

Dunstan Times, Issue 1130, 28 December 1883, Page 3

A CRYING SHAME.

It is scarcely credible that in an Australian colnnv such a case could occur as that to which the Queensland Press ;ban late'y been earnestly drawing the a t'*niimi of the public and the Government The ca-e is one of a woman having throe children, being life a widow by the drowning of her husband, upon whom a writ for n debt of L9B incurred hy her husband ‘Not having the money she was sent to gaol more than a year ago, and there she st’ll lies. Her children she left with the matron at the depot, at Cooktown, with whom she deposited a'l the money she had, about L4O. After being : u gaol for a month or two she filed her shedule in forma pauperis, and placed soms papers and documents in connection with he matter in the ‘hands of a solicitor, to whom she also gave a b'ank order on the matron at Cooktown with whom she had left the L4O, requesting him to fill it up for the amount of his chrrges. Time still passed on. No measures were taken for her relief, and all her attempts to get Satisfaction from the solicitor were in vain. She could gat no reply to her letters, and could not get her papers back, and on making inquiries of the matron at Cooktown she learned that the solicitor had drawn the whole of the L4O The matron also told her that she could no longer keep the children, whom' she would have to send to the orphanage. The poor woman represented her case to the visiting Justice o'er and over again, but he could do nothing in the matter. And so the case stands. There is, it is stated, no means of getting tjie woman out of gaol or of bringing the rascally solicitor to account for the money. Really it seems absorb for a colony to be giving its interest to the questions who is in or out of Parliament, or in or out of office, or whether this man or that is better suited for the Speakership, when the end of maintaining liberties and security of the citizen, to which all «t this noisily creaking machinery is ostensibly directed, so utterly fails of realisation as in this particular case. — Australasian.