Lost Art Press

A remarkable criminal case was once tried before Baron Parke, in which his ruling and sentence were at the time considered extremely hard and severe; upon re-argument before the fifteen judges in London his law was held to be sound, and has remained as a text in succeeding cases.

The prisoner purchased at an auction an old bureau, and finding it rather too long for a recess in which he wished to fit it, got a carpenter to cut off a portion of the moulding at one end. While this was doing, a secret drawer flew open and disclosed one hundred guineas, which had been hidden there; the carpenter claimed half, as the finder of the coin; this was refused, and a single guinea given him, the purchaser taking the rest of the money and appropriating it to his own use. The carpenter blazed abroad the story, the heir-at-law of the deceased owner of the bureau claimed the money, and being refused, gave the purchaser into custody for stealing his property.

The case was tried at the Liverpool Assizes before Baron Parke, who told the jury that the prisoner only bought the bureau, and that that only was intended to be sold, that the money was still legally in the custody of the man who placed it there, or of his heirs-at-law, and that if they believed the fact that the prisoner took the money from the bureau, and spent it, that was larceny in the eye of the law. The jury had no alternative but to find a verdict of guilty, and the judge sentenced the prisoner to three months imprisonment with hard labour.

Recollections of Baron Parke

The Leisure Hour – (London) 1879

– Jeff Burks

It has been said that “cleanliness is next to Godliness.” This is an axiom and does not need demonstration to prove the truth of it, but we may go a little further and say, that when applied to shops and mills that it is necessary to prosperity, for wherever you may go, or whatever mill, or yard, or shop you may go into and find everything at loose ends, and tools laying around promiscuously and many of them hung up on the floor or shied away under the benches, or if you go through the lumber yard and find piles of boards or plank or nice timber uncovered, and piles of boards left with part of them thrown down where they ought to be piled up nicely and covered, I say that where these conditions exist, you can take your note book out and write down. “This concern will eventually go to the bad, unless it becomes converted to the gospel cleanliness and order.” “Order is Heaven’s first law ” and unless we obey that law to the letter, we shall surely have to suffer the penalty for disobedience to its demands. Order and cleanliness about any place of business, is just as necessary as sunlight to the growth of vegetation.

The loss of time spent in hunting for mislaid tools amounts in the course of a year to hundreds of dollars in shops where everything is left to take care of itself which somebody has got to pay for, and in lumber manufacturing places it comes on the owners because all the work is done at the owners expense unless you are sawing or turning or planing for your customer by the hour which happens only once in a while, and then if your bill amounts to more than he thinks it ought to, next time he will go some where else with his work and indirectly you are a loser because you do not have the work to do.
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