Probably the first society or asylum in history for poor children was the foundation established by the Emperor Trajan (about A. D. 110) for destitute and abandoned children. The property thus established in perpetuity, with real estate and money at interest (at five per cent.), was equivalent in value to $920,000, and supported some five thousand children of both sexes. Singularly enough, there seems to have been only one illegitimate child to one hundred and fifty legitimate in these institutions.
The Antonines, as might be expected, did not neglect this charity; but both Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius founded associations for destitute girls. Alexander Severus established one also for poor children. These form the only organized efforts made for this object, during many centuries, by the most civilized and refined state of antiquity.
The number, however, of these wretched creatures, increased beyond all cure from scattered exceptional efforts like these. Everywhere the poor got rid of their children by exposure, or sold them as slaves. The rich, if indifferent to their offspring, or unwilling to take the trouble of rearing them, sent them out to the public square, where pimps, beggars, witches, and slave-dealers gleaned their horrible harvest. At length, under the influence of Christianity, legislation began to take cognizance of the practice.
The Emperor Constantine, the Emperor Valentian, Valens, and Gratian, sixty years later, continued this humane legislation.
They ordered, under strict penalties, that every one should nourish his own children, and forbade exposition; declaring also that no one had the right to reclaim the children he had abandoned; the motive to this law being the desire to make it for the interest of those "taking up" exposed children to keep them, even if necessary, as slaves, against any outside claims.
Unfortunately, at that period, slavery was held a less evil than the ordinary fate to which the poor left their children.
The punishment of death was also decreed against Infanticide.
It is an interesting fact that a portion, and probably the whole, of our ancestral tribes looked with the greatest horror on abortion and infanticide. The laws of the Visigoths punished these offenses with death or blindness. Their influence, of course, should always be considered, as well as that of Christianity, in estimating the modern position of woman and the outcast child, as compared with their status under Greek and Roman civilization.
At a later period (412 A. D.) the imperial legislation again endeavored to prevent the reclaiming of exposed children from compassionate persons who had taken them. "Were they right to say that those children belonged to them when they had despised them even to the point of abandoning them to death?"
It was provided also, that in future no one should "take from the ground" exposed children except in the presence of witnesses, and that the archbishop should put his signature on the document of guardianship which was prepared. (Cod. Theod., lib. 5, tit. 7, De Expositis.)