A CHADBAND.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1557, 24 February 1887, Page 3

A CHADBAND.

Obadband cams to judgment in the Weitmnistar Police Court in the person of Edward Curtis, Steele, Nothing more grotesquely gad has ever been reported than this story of a local preacher living on the mendicancy of a child of eleven, and beating him brutally when he did not bring home enough money. The child is now in an industrial school, but, before he went, he was found crawling about the streets at two in the morning. He dreaded going home to face an angry father without being able to report a snffioently brisk sale of certain tracts on Apostolical Christianity and Eternal Punishment entrusted to bis care. When the tracts did not go off well, he was to say that he was selling them to support a sick parent. The sick parent, however, was sufficiently convalescent to thrash him within an inch of his life if he ventured to come back empty handed. The father’s defence was that it was all done for fear of spoiling the child by saving the rod. But his rod was a knotted rope, and the place of correction a dark room, while the blows were delivered on a body that vras half staryed. A neighbor, who described the unmerciful thrashings administered to this hardened little offender of eleven, broke down as she gave her evidence. The violence was due to no exceptional outburst of temper. The child was sometimes beaten as often as five times in one week, and his Sabbaths were passed in the dark room, on’a ration ol bread and water, While the son was engaged in this way, the father was holding forth on what he was pleased to call religion in Hyde Park, and with such fervour as frequently to draw tears from his own eyes. In fact, he lived on what he did not understand—religion: and declined to live by what he did—his trade of a carpenter. No people rejoice more than the truly religious when an impostor of this kind is exposed, snd it must be a source of sincere satisfaction to them to know that he was sentenced to six months’ hard labor, with the prospect of a new prosecution on his release, There is no more of a moral in such a case against religion, or against street preaching, than there is against carpentering j all that is proved is that a brute has been found out. The Society for the Protection of Children has done good service in taking up the prosecution.—Daily News.