Is the strange and, on the face of the report,
most flagrant sen- tence passed on a child of eleven,—one, indeed, asserted by the mother of the child to be only ten, and so small that he was hardly seen above the dock,—by one of our London Police Magistrates, Mr. Barstow, of Clerkenwell, last Monday, for stealing a leek, mis- reported in the Times, or are the facts really as there stated ? It is asserted in the Times of Tuesday that this child, William Lambourne, was charged with stealing a leek out of St. Pancras Churchyard,—which has been recently converted into an orna- mental garden. The house-leek was valued at 4d., and—so it is stated—the child was sentenced by Mr. Barstow to twenty- one days' hard labour in the House of Correction. If the facts be as reported, a more monstrous sentence was never passed. Had the charge been a mere excuse for getting the child removed, with the consent of his parents, from the influence of bad compan- ions, then he ought to have been sent to a reformatory, not to a place where he will be less likely to improve than to deterio- rate. But if that were not the object, so mere an infant ought, of course, to have been dismissed with a warning, or a shilling fine at most inflicted, in order to compel his parents to punish him. Whatever the facts really were, Mr. Barstow's repu- tation as a police magistrate depends on their being properly known ; and it will suffer so much that we doubt the public ever again placing any sort of confidence in his decisions if it should, almost per impossibile, turn out that they are properly known already.
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