[197] Quintilian, Declamationes, 506. Plutarch, De amore prolis, 5.
[198] Lecky, History of European Morals, ii. 28. Lallemand, Histoire des enfants abandonnés et délaissés, p. 59.
[199] Mommsen, Römisches Strafrecht, p. 619.
As is generally the case in the savage world, so among semi-civilised and civilised nations whose customs allow or tolerate infanticide, the child, if not suffered to live, has to be killed in its earliest infancy. Among the Chinese[200] and Rajputs[201] it is destroyed immediately after its birth. In the Scandinavian North the killing or exposure of an infant who had already been sprinkled with water was regarded as murder.[202] At Athens parents were punished for exposing children whom they had once begun to rear.[203]
[200] Gutzlaff, op. cit. i. 59.
[201] Church Missionary Intelligencer, xi. 81. Chevers, op. cit. p. 752.
[202] Grimm, Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer, i. 457.
[203] Schoemann, Griechische Alterthümer, i. 503.
The practice of exposing new-born infants, so common in the Pagan Empire, was vehemently denounced by the early Fathers of the Church.[204] They tried to convince men that, if the abandoned infant died, the unnatural parent was guilty of nothing less than murder, whilst the sinful purposes for which foundlings were often used formed another argument against exposure.[205] The enormity of the crime of causing an infant’s death was enhanced by the notion that children who had died unbaptised were doomed to eternal perdition.[206] According to a decree of the Council of Mentz in 852, the penance imposed on the mother was heavier if she killed an unbaptised than if she killed a baptised child.[207] In the year 1556, Henry II. of France made a law which punished as a child-murderer any woman who had concealed her pregnancy and delivery, and whose child was found dead, “privé, tant du saint sacrement de baptesme, que sépulture publique et accoustumée.”[208] This statute—to which there is a counterpart in England in the statute 21 Jac. I. c. 27,[209] and in the Scotch law of 1690, c. 21[210]—thus went so far as to constitute a presumptive murder, avowedly under the influence of that Christian dogma to which Mr. Lecky attributes, in the first instance, “the healthy sense of the value and sanctity of infant life which so broadly distinguishes Christian from Pagan societies.”[211]
[204] See Terme and Monfalcon, Histoire des enfans trouvés, p. 67 sqq.