MORAL WASTERS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4709, 9 June 1924, Page 2

MORAL WASTERS.

IT PAYS TO BE HONEST. Lord Darling, following the Bishop of Kingston as speaker at a meeting in connection with the Prisoners’ Aid Society at the Middlesex Guildhall, reports the Daily Telegraph, said the organisers of the meeting evidently studied dramatic fitness when they ' arranged that the first .speaker had been one who had spent many years of his life in trying to keep people out of prison, and that the next should be another who had spent even more years of his life in putting people in. (Laughter.) "But both the processes are necessary,” added Lord Darling, “and I have little doubt that the Bishop has kept more people out of prison than I have put in there. Someare undoubtedly reformed by punishment. They are taught that on the whole—l wish more people realised it ) —it pays best to be honest.” There were a number of people whom nothing would .make honest. There was a regular criminal class. There were people who lilted the life, and who put up with, prfsohras an occasional incident. Sometimes they got the better ' of society; ■sometimes society got the better of them. It was not easy to become law-abiding or honest if a man .had been for some considerable time against the law. The Bishop of Kingston said that there were districts in South London where it almost seemed, as if with intention, all - that was beautiful in God’s world had been blotted out with the utmost hid•eousness of man's invention. If they i knew that sort of area as he was bound to know it in his work as a bishop, what came home to them more and more was not the fact that there were individuals who broke out and became moral wasters, but that their number was so comparatively small, while the vast majority showed examples of courage, of patience, of cheerfulness, and real goodness that put some of them who had better conditions of life to shame.