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Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 1014, 20 December 1881, Page 2

A meeting of the P. B. Cricket Club will be held in the Masonic Hotel this evening. Tenders are required up to four o’clock tomorrow afternoon, for additions to the Gisborne District School.

District orders are out for parades of the Battery J. Volunteers as per notice in another column.

A perusal of the receipts and expenditure of the Day Entertainment shows a net surplus of £24 Bs. All accounts owing by Mr Day are to be sent in to Mr S. Stevenson for payment, by Friday next, tho 23rd.

“Me Mellish, R.M., of Christchurch, holds to the old adage—‘ Spare the rod spoil the child.’ He lately sentenced a youth named Davis to receive eighteen lasses of the cat-o’-nine-tails in addition to forty-eight hours’ imprisonment for stealing two walking sticks.”

So writes a contemporary. If this is law it appears to be something more than justice. If this Mr Mellish is a man in gender, and appearance, he is a fiend in form and feeling. Such a sentence is revenge, a barbaric hatred of humanity. The man who could pass so severe a sentence for so trivial an act, must be hardened against the enjoined duty of tempering justice with mercy. There must be some secret, lurking, desire to punish, not for the adequate correction of a crime, but for the savage joy felt in being the instrument of torture to a fellow creature. This Mr Mellish is the Magistrate of whom it is reported his wife recently received a threatening letter, warning her that her “ old man would get his head smashed some dark night,” if he persisted in so cruelly punishing offenders brought before him. No doubt such a threat is improper; but let our readers reverse their position. Suppose himself or herself a parent with a, perhaps, otherwise, tender, loving son, in the position of the youth whom we are told was ignominiously beaten with the lash. Perhaps this threat came from a strong man, the boy’s father, whose outraged feelings could find no other vent. Or, perhaps, from a sorrowing mother, whose woman’s heart was torn with anguish, such as mothers alone can feel, at the mental sight of her boy writhing under the lash as a common, hardened felon.

The point to be noticed is not that crime must go unpunished, but that punishment should not be excessive, nor unsuitable. And this brings us to the question, is it desirable that such enormous power, as the infliction of the lash, on juvenile offenders, should be placed in the hands of stipendiary Magistrates ? It is quite possible that a whipping, or a sound caning, will have a salutary effect on an incorrigible urchin whose petty depredations are leading him to a course of bigger crimes ; but those, if privately administered, will not crush the victim’s sense of moral feeling out of him, nor cast him forth into, or rather on to the world as an irretrievably disgraced being. Magistrates, and other administrators of the law, have been known to have sons whose propensities have led them to venial larcenies, if not of walking-sticks, of orchards and strawberry beds ; and if Mellish is blessed with such an one he may find his harsh sentences recoil on himself. Any way, the severity of the sentence certainly, as reported, appears to require the attention of the Minister of Justice.