The Rev. E. Moore, Vicar of Spalding, Lincolnshire, with three
or four other magistrates, recently sentenced a girl of thirteen to fourteen days' imprisonment and four years in a refotanatory, for plucking a geranium in the garden of the Spalding almshouses. The report of the case was at first not believed, but Mr. Cross was asked to inquire, and on Tuesday regretted to be compelled to state that the reports in circulation were true. He at once remitted the sentence, and the Lord Chancellor will, it is hoped, dismiss the Chairman of the Petty Sessions, Mr. Moore, from the Bench. Mr. Moore has since taken the opportunity of a meeting of the Oddfellows to explain his conduct. He had been fifteen years a magistrate, and had passed five hundred judgments a year, and he considered, from statements laid before him privately, that a girl of the "peculiar temperament" of Sarah Chandler would be benefited by a few years in a reformatory. He had persuaded his brother magistrates, and though he hoped her liberation would do her good, he was doubtful of it. He, however, always submitted himself to authority. In other words, Mr. Moore thinks himself justified in imprisoning children for years if, on statements laid before him, it seems to him that such treatment will do them good. He is not, as we have argued elsewhere, necessarily a bad man for holding that view, but holding it, he is unfitted by want of sense for a seat on the Bench.
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