It is much to be regretted that, after many years of experiment With juvenile courts of a special character, a sharp controversy should be provoked by a measure shortly to be introduced in the House of Lords. The Bill applies, not to the-country generally, but to the Metropolitan Police Court district alone. It contains, however, an innovation which may well in years to come influence the life of every considerable city. The Bill is designed for the centralizing of the work now carried on in the juvenile courts. It provides for the creation of a central court, over which a police magistrate shall preside, the court also to comprise two justices of the peace, of whom one shall be a woman. The police magistrate is empowered to sit alone in any case where he considers it impracticable for the court to be otherwise constituted. Power-is given for the closing of existing courts. In these proposals two principles of importance seem to be affected. In the first place, the giving of so much power into the hands of the stipendiary magistrate, sitting in a court 80 formed, implies that the juvenile delinquent shall be regularly dealt with in the atmosphere of the police court, which is the negation of the idea upon which the children's court, wherever it has worked successfully, has been built up. In the second place, the plan of centralize ing authority would, if carried out, tend strongly to neutralize those personal influences which it is possible fully to employ in the local courts. It is not surprising that \the women probation officers working in the district juvenile courts should be uttering vigorous protests against the Bill; nor need we wonder that even some magistrates who are disposed to condemn the methods of the genuine children's court as mere sentimentality should be hostile to its chief provision. We regret the controversy, however, mainly because it may very easily bring harm to an institution which needs to be more widely known and adopted.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.