MELBOURNE'S BOYHOOD.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 6, Issue 1633, 13 March 1884, Page 2

MELBOURNE'S BOYHOOD.

The Melbourne correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald writes There is talk about Gordon's boy, Gordon's boy is aged six years, and Gordon says he is such a desperate; character that he cannot manage him, : He therefore prays the magistrate to send him to the Industrial School for a season, But the magistrates think that Gordon ought to be equal to the control of this six-year-old larrikin, and refuse to take upon themselves in this the locus parentis. And this matter of Gordon's boy brings up the subject generally of boys. There ate thousands of such boys in this city beyond parental control. You can find them everywhere; and thoy are not vagabond boys either, for they have homes, and fathers and mothers, and they have plenty to eat, and do not dress in rags; and, in short, there :is no reason whatever why they should be allowed to wander about the streets, stealing any thing that is not too heavy to carry away; stoning dogs or smaller children; smoking exceedingly bid tobacco; ais: •smearing walls with filth, breaking thii trees in the public gardens, and generally making themselves as disagreeable as their unchecked malignity enables

them. The reason of their savagery is not at all far to seek; it is simply the consequonce of a neglect of home discipjiiify and those who neglect this home disciplino are the men who, for nearly thirty years, have enjoyed the liberty of the eight Hours' system, which was to furnish the working , man with leisure sufficient to enable him, among other things, to train tip his family in the way they ought to go, And so Gordon's bov ia only one of the thouof proofs which show: that the working man, so much flattered and fooled, has fulfilled none of the prophecies that were made of his capacity to vise with the circumstances. And I insist that he has not risen with his circumstances either morally, mentally, or technically. He is not now a better man, or better 1 workman, or better educated, than he ; was when, he complained that he was ground down by exhausting toil, ■ which toil he said blunted his moral sense, dulled his intellectual perceptions, crushed out his thinking powers, and reduced him to the condition of a machine. So I say that Gordon's Boy is a good title for a long essay upon the failure of tho eight-hour system.