MAGISTRATES AND LOAFERS. A Weak System.

Free Lance, Volume V, Issue 259, 17 June 1905, Page 6

MAGISTRATES AND LOAFERS. A Weak System.

A YOUNG man, who, Dr McArthur remarked, "was looking for work, and praying to God he wouldn't get it," has gone to' gaol for a month. He is a young man with a record, and he fleeced his landlady to the extent of £1 16s. The month's gaol is to cure him of swindling landladies, and thieving, and being a vagrant. The landlady, and other landladies who are victims of this sort of young man, may have some satisfaction in seeing the "bad egg" gaoled, but it does not repay the landlady for her monetary loss. * * • In fact, by gentle rest and gentle exercise for a. month this particular young man discharges his liability. Perhaps the young man is worthless enough when he is his own master, but when a stern gentleman, with a Snider rifle containing a dose of slugs, is pottering about he can be made to justify his existence. Intelligently guided, he is capable of doing reproductive work. It is a fair thing to make him work to pay his debts Dr McAithur saiu he would assist the man to find work when he came out of gaol. There doesn't seem to be any machinery that will make it legal to attach the wages he will earn on Dr. Me Arthur's promised job Scoundrels of this kind pick their maiks, as Dr McArthur said, "the victims invariably being widows and poor people A man who. because he can't get work, pitches on a woman to victimise, isn't adequately punished by being allowed to rest foi a month The chances are he will review in his mind during his temporary retirement a list of widows whom he can swindle when he is again "looking for work." The law punishes the wrong-doer, but it doesn't recompense the person to whom the wrong is done, and that person is still a victim, despite the protection of society from a criminal for a month * # » That the ne'er-do-weels who persistently swindle boarding-house keep-

ers, and often enough escape because of the boarding-house keeper's horror of court proceedings, should make forced reparation, is undoubted, and that this reform will in time be effected is to be hoped. Always these scamps ask for "a chance."* They don't give many. The widow is as much entitled to a chance asthe out-of-work who vanishes in the night and leaves an empty portmanteau.