Eye-Blacker

Before Magistrate Sylvester Sabbatino in Brooklyn, N. Y., one day last week stood David Weiss, 17, U. S. Junior Communist Leaguer, charged with soliciting alms for textile strikers.

Declared the judge to the prisoner-at-the-bar: ''What you need is for me to have you in a two-by-four room. What I would do to you! I'd blacken your eyes and give you some real American spirit and do for you what your parents should have done. . . . We spend billions in this country for schools and what have we educated here--a mongrel and a moron. . . . I have six kiddies myself and my oldest girl is ten. She knows who God is and the laws of the country. Down at my house we have a cat-o'-nine-tails. I show it, and that is all . . . that is needed. . . . I am not going to send you to jail. That would make a martyr out of you.* Get out of this courtroom. You are not fit to be here."

*Paraphrase of the White House's statement last month when the young Communists picketed it (TIME, Dec. 23). Said the White House: ". . . A night in jail is only doing them the favor of giving them a cheap martyrdom."

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