The Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, MARCH 19, 1907. THE DOOR OF HOPE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3762, 19 March 1907, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, MARCH 19, 1907. THE DOOR OF HOPE.

Real friendship ripens and thrives! in the poorest of soil. Your real, friends will be the same to you whether you are wearing a sixguinea suit or a piece of flax bale. Maybe you are a fool. Most of us are fools once in a while, and adversity gives us the best chance of seeing what large-sized fools we can be. Maybe adversity is the evil influence that tells us peculation will help us out of difficulty. Man is weak. He is weaker with an empty stomach. There is no credit in being honest when one’s waistcoat is bulged out with the good things beneath, and the bank book is bloated. And suppose you are hit hard. Suppose that fortune is too fickle to smile at all. Suppose your boots are holey and your pockets empty. Perhaps you are one of those people one reads about in books who is stronger for trouble,and who goes out and faces it like a man and makes a fortune out of your last copper. But perhaps on the other hand you are just weakly human. You end up in gaol, because you have been unfortunate and being unfortunate became weak. Here is a case that is by no means suppositious. A young man of twenty had been doing skilled work for a Southern firm. The ordinary wages for the billet would be three pounds a week. The young man’s father was dead. He had a sick mother, two younger brothers not old enough to work —and one pound a week ! The young man obtained eatables from a merchant on a forged order—signed for the firm that- 'engaged him, The goods were ' immediately recovered and no one really lost anything in value. The young man was of course very properly arrested, detained until the sittings of the Supreme Court, and charged with the offence. He pleaded guilty. The judge made the most searching enquiries into the case and extended to the young man the benefits of the First Offenders’ Probation Act. The probation

officer didn’t dog the life out ot that first offender. He got him a billet at £2 10s per week, and hope came back at once. But no sooner had the young man started work than he was re-arrested on another charge, the offence having been committed simultaneously with the first and being almost identical with it. We merely want to know whether the boy or the firm that gave him a pound a week to do skilled work and keep four persons, one ill, was the greater offender ? And this brings ,us down to the good work just undertaken by a strong committee in Wellington. Judges, magistrates, and the police most happily combine to make it easier than formerly for a man who has been to gaol to go straight. A man cannot go straight if he has nothing to go on, any more than an elephant can walk on air. The folks who plan to set ex-prispners on their feet again after their discharge are doing the noblest work possible. Very few people are wholly bad—and nobody is wholly good. Most of us haven’t fallen because we haven’t been pushed. Many Who have fallen may easily rise if they are lifted. The persistent criminal cannot be- reclaimed, any more than the dipsomaniac call be cured. But the temporarily weak may be strengthened by such medicine as that'newly-formed society will administer—the incentive to live by the-work of the hands in an honest way. One of the chief troubles in regard to ex-prisoners is that their sin, whatever may have been the circumstances, always follows them. A man may have obtained honest work away from the town he had been sent to gaol in. Somebody will sooner or ' later point him out as having “done time,” and under such circumstances it is extremely difficult for such a person to keep a job. People have a natural antipathy to ‘ ‘ gaol birds ’ ’—especially good, strong moral persons with full purses and stomachs. There would be less necessity for gaol if there were fewer good strong honest persons with full stomachs who are fond of casting the stone at a less strong man. Some people’s claim of freedom is based on the fact that their sin has never been found out. Many people are in gaol because of an insufficiency of natural cunning. Many people give up hope and dodge back wards and forwards to gaol merely because good honest people are horror-stricken at seeing them at large. Every magistrate and judge in New Zealand has sentenced many persons and saved many others. They do not send men to gaol for amusement and it pleases them better to send them on the way to honest work than to breaking stones, attired in barbarous broad-arrowed garments. If the whole of the police force were imbued with the spirit that animates the Supreme Court Bench of New Zealand, that ot checking crime only, and not of making “ cases,” what a combination for crime suppression it would be ! We know that in the ranks of the New Zealand police there are many men who have been angels of mercy to discharged prisoners. We know of probation officers who never spare themselves in an endeavour to reform unfortunates in the only reasonable way, by. giving them a start at honest work. All such men we honour, for in their hands is the fate for good or ill of many of their fellow men. The basis of every evil act is opportunity, and the man who gives a person one pound a week for doing three pounds’ worth of work is giving him an opportunity to commit evil.