202 A FARMER'S YEAR 



This morning I went to record my vote at the polling-station 

 at Broonie, where everything seemed very quiet, and then on to 

 the bench. Here the greater part of our business consisted of 

 School Board prosecutions, to my mind the most troublesome and 

 perplexing form of case with which a magistrate is called upon 

 to deal. Of course, as I have had to explain many and many a 

 time during recent years, the law is perfectly clear. If a child 

 under a certain age is irregular in its attendance at school, except 

 for some very good reason, such as sickness, of which a doctor's 

 certificate must be produced, its parents are liable to be fined five 

 shillings, which fine can be recovered by distress. 



Such is the plain law, but the enforcing of it is by no means 

 as plain. Magistrates are frequently blamed for the most part 

 by doctrinaire enthusiasts or persons who have little practical 

 acquaintance with the conditions under which the poor live 

 because they are not more severe upon this class of offence. Yet 

 in many instances the circumstances brought before them are so 

 piteous that they feel it would be nothing short of wicked to add 

 to the misery of the persons concerned by a fine to be levied on 

 such belongings as they still possess. Sometimes the husband is 

 a drunkard, and the mother keeps the child at home to mind the 

 little ones while she goes out to work in the fields to find bread 

 to put into the mouths of all of them. Sometimes she is sick 

 very likely being confined of the twelfth or thirteenth baby and 

 an elder girl who has not yet passed her appointed standards is 

 forced to take her place for the time being ; and so on, with 

 variations. 



For instance, to-day one woman, a widow with a large family, 

 who burst out weeping in the box, told us a tale of her utter 

 penury, and of how she was sometimes obliged to detain the child 

 on whose account she had been summoned at home to look after 

 her small brothers and sisters while she went out to work. Another 

 woman drew from under her apron a pair of boots, or rather the 

 remains of what was once a pair of boots, for they were all holes, 

 and asked the bench how in this cold, wet weather she could 



