Page 2 Advertisements Column 5

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 277, 20 May 1912, Page 2

A fiftecn-ycar-old schoolboy and a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl who had eloped returned to their anxious parents in New York, after the police of the whole country had been searching for them for three days. "Nobody would marry us, and our money was nearly gone, so we came back." Questioned by the girl's father, Mr. Edelhorff, a civil engineer, the boy described how, having fifteen shillings between them, after church on Sunday evening he and the girl decided to elope and get married. They took a train to Newhaven, forty miles away, and found two rooms in a modest lodging house. They began their matrimonial enquiries. Every day they visited the marriage license bureau, and each time their courage failed them and they did not enter. The chastisement of the prospective bridegroom was prevented by the prospective bride, who pleaded, "It wasn't Johnny's fault, father. I made him a Leap Year proposal, and ho couldn't help himself."

Mrs. Harrison Robertson, speaking at the National Congress of .Mothers, in New York recently, startled her audience by declaring that the greatest number of women criminals come, not from the workers in factories and shops, but from the home. The reason, as Mrs. Robertson sees it, is poverty. She assorts that bread is needed before books, and poverty makes more crime than ignorance, because it brings people to desperation soon. She uses these arguments as a plea for the pensioning of mothers who have the care of young children. Such a plan has been tried in Chicago with commendable results, and in California the Congress of Mothers pays a pension amounting to what a child's earnings- ivonld be, so that it may be kept in school two years longer than is required by the law. Any movement, Mrs. Robertson urges, having for its object the education of children, is a sure way to bring about a reduction of ■poverty, and consequently to improve the condition of the mother in the home,