“HE HAD STOLEN.”

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXV, Issue 9, 9 January 1913, Page 5

“HE HAD STOLEN.”

“I happened to go into a suburban Court,” writes the special London representative of the Sydney ‘Sun,’ “where a labouring man was charged with stealing a loaf of bread. He was a man of good physique, and who had spent long years at day labour. Ho was gnarled and knotted with toil. The. police gave him a most excellent character. He had been an exemplary citizen,,obeying the law and paying his way like an honest man. But he stole a loaf of bread. The chairman of the bench enquired why he stole the bread. The man said he had beeiTemployed in a railway company all his life, but he had grown old; that he had married somewhat late, that his strength had failed him a little, and they supplanted him by a younger man, and lie had been unable to obtain work elsewhere. Everything he had was pledged to provide provisions. At last his house was stripped, and his wife and four children, all under eight years of age, were starving. The policeman (policemen in England honestly strive to further the cause of justice) intervened and said that he had found the statement absolutely correct. He had gone to the man’s humble cottage, and he had found tho children literally crying from the gnawings of hunger, and that he had provided for their immediate necessities out of his own slender wage. The bench congratulated the constable, and then gave the man a week’s imprisonment. He had stolen, and the law had to be vindicated.”