SUPREME COURT SITTINGS.

Greymouth Evening Star, Volume XXXI, 15 February 1901, Page 4

SUPREME COURT SITTINGS.

(per press association.)

Christchurch, Feb. 13.

In sentencing a young man in the Supreme to-day for damaging the Fernss wheel Judge Edwards expressed sorrow that a man a native of the colony should be guilty of such an act. Continuing, he said he believed that some ingenious gentleman not wholly unomnected with the press had published articles dealing with the records of this colony as compared with those of the Old Country. His honor however did n„t know that the writer had shown that there was a difference in this colony. A person who was honestly inclined, and who displayed an ordinary amount of industry, was not under the sl ; ghtcst temptation to become a erimii'ii 1 . In conntries like England, I and London, people were born into criminality and were bred in in it, and they had no resources but criminal ones. Persons who were b„m in New Zealand came from parents who had had sufficient enterprise to come out into the colony, where they made homes and lived respectable lives. Natives of New Zealand also had all the advantages of a healthy upbringing and a magnificent climate. If under such circumstances large numbers of them became criminals, as he had said before, and as ho said again, it was a lamentable fact and was an evil for which philanthropists might well seek a cause.