Id.... Mrs. Reichardt tells of a certain Moslem, of high standing in the society of Damascus, who “married a young girl of ten, and, after she had born him two sons, he drove her almost mad with such cruelty and unkindness that she escaped, and went back to her father. Her husband sent for her to return, and, as she was hidden out of his sight, he wrung the necks of both his sons, and sent their bodies to his wife to show her what he had in store for her. The young mother, not yet twenty, died in a few days.”—(See Nineteenth Century, June, 1891.)
Id.... It will not be forgotten that, in more than one of the older civilisations, the father had the power of life and death over the members of the family, even past adult age.
And, to come to quite recent times, and this our England, Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy, to whose unflagging energy, during some fifteen years of labour, was mainly attributable (as the Parliamentary sponsors of the measures know) the amelioration in the English law concerning wives and mothers, embodied in the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, together with the later and beneficent Guardianship of Infants Act, 1886, relates, in her record of the history of this latter Act:—
“It will be remembered that so recently as 1883, a young lady petitioned that she might be allowed to spend her summer holidays with her own mother, from whom she was separated for no fault of her own or of her mother’s, but in virtue of the supreme legal rights of her father. The Court refused her petition, natural and proper as it seems to everyone of human feelings; and the words of the Master of the Rolls in giving judgment, on the 24th of July, 1883, are more significant and instructive as to the actual state of the law than the words of any non-professional writer can be:—‘The law of England recognises the rights of the father, not as the guardian, but because he is the father of his children.... The rights of the father are recognised because he is the father; his duties as a father are recognised because they are natural duties. The natural duties of a father are to treat his children with the utmost affection, and with infinite tenderness.... The law recognises these duties, from which if a father breaks he breaks from everything which nature calls upon him to do; and, although the law may not be able to insist upon their performance, it is because the law recognises them, and knows that in almost every case the natural feelings of a father will prevail. The law trusts that the father will perform his natural duties, and does not, and, indeed, cannot, inquire how they have been performed.... I am not prepared to say whether when the child is a ward of Court, and the conduct of the father is such as to exhaust all patience—such, for instance, as cruelty, or pitiless spitefulness carried to a great extent—the Court might not interfere. But such interference will be exercised ONLY IN THE UTMOST NEED, AND IN MOST EXTREME CASES. It is impossible to lay down the rule of the Court more clearly than has been done by Vice-Chancellor Bacon in the recent case of “Re. Plowley” (47 “L.T.,” N.S., 283). In saying that this Court, “whatever be its authority or jurisdiction, has no authority to interfere with the sacred right of a father over his own children,” the learned Vice-Chancellor has summed up all that I intended to say. The rights of a father are sacred rights, because his duties are sacred....’
“These sacred rights of the father were, it will be observed, in the eyes of the law so exclusive and paramount as to justify and demand the refusal to a young girl, at the most critical period of early womanhood, of the solace of a few weeks’ intercourse with a blameless and beloved mother; and this although the gratification of the daughter’s wish would have involved no denial to the father of the solace of his daughter’s company, since she was not actually, but only legally, in his custody, not having seen him for more than a year.
“It will be seen from this that the father alone has the absolute legal right to deal with his child or children, to the extent of separating them, at his own sole pleasure, from their mother, and of giving them into the care and custody of any person whom he may think fit. The mother has, as such, no legal status, no choice, voice, lot, or part in the matter.”—Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy (“The Infants’ Act, 1886,” p. 2).
It is consolatory to learn that a palliation of some part of the above unjust conditions has been achieved; yet how often has our presumedly happy land witnessed scenes of child misery and helpless mother-love, to which was denied even the poor consolation, so pathetically depicted by Mrs. Browning, in a scene which, as Moir truly says, “weighs on the heart like a nightmare”;—
“Do you hear the children weeping, oh! my brothers!
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,