§ MR. MILBANKasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Why a boy named G. W. Smith (though young, of notoriously bad character), sentenced by the Chairman and Bench of Magistrates at Northallerton Petty 1300 Sessions to the York Industrial School until he attained the age of sixteen for robbing his father's till, was liberated on the recommendation of several Memorialists without any of the committing magistrates being consulted, who could have proved that the father of the boy had been convicted of drunkenness, and that on three recent occasions the police had been called to his house, where they found the man intoxicated, and his wife wounded and bleeding through his violence; and, whether the correspondence and names of the Memorialists will be given to the Bench of Magistrates, including the Chairman of the North Riding Quarter Sessions and the Chairman of Petty Sessions at Northallerton?
MR. ASSHETON CROSS,in reply, said, that he quite agreed in the spirit of the hon. Member's Question. No doubt the magistrates ought to have been consulted, and it was through an inadvertence that that course had not been taken. In the case of reformatories, when a boy was reported to have behaved well in school, the managers sometimes recommended that he should be released, and their recommendation was occasionally acted upon. In the present case the Rector of Northallerton, the national schoolmaster of that place, and Mr. G. W. Elliot, the Member for the borough, signed a Memorial in favour of the character, not of the boy, but of his father. He did not think that there would be any advantage in laying the particulars of the case before the Bench of Magistrates.