Part 9 (1/2)

”I wish they would,” I said. ”I have been trying a good many years to make them understand what the law is; but they do not. People who do not vote pay no attention to the laws until they suffer from them.”

She went away protesting that she, at least, would not hold her tongue on the subject, and I hope she will not. The actual text of the law to which she objected is as follows:--

”Every person authorized by law to make a will, except married women, shall have a right to appoint by his will a guardian or guardians for his children during their minority.”[1]

There is not a.s.sociated with this, in the statute, the slightest clause in favor of the mother; nor anything which could limit the power of the guardian by requiring deference to her wishes, although he could, in case of gross neglect or abuse, be removed by the court, and another guardian appointed. There is not a line of positive law to protect the mother. Now, in a case of absolute wrong, a single sentence of law is worth all the chivalrous courtesy this side of the Middle Ages.

It is idle to say that such laws are not executed. They are executed. I have had letters, too agonizing to print, expressing the sufferings of mothers under laws like these. There lies before me a letter,--not from Rhode Island,--written by a widowed mother who suffers daily tortures, even while in possession of her child, at the knowledge that it is not legally hers, but held only by the temporary permission of the guardian appointed under her husband's will.

”I beg you,” she says, ”to take this will to the hilltop, and urge law-makers in our next legislature to free the State record from the shameful story that no mother can control her child unless it is born out of wedlock.”

”From the moment,” she says, ”when the will was read to me, I have made no effort to set it aside. I wait till G.o.d reveals his plans, so far as my own condition is concerned. But out of my keen comprehension of this great wrong, notwithstanding my submission for myself, my whole soul is stirred,--for my child, who is a little woman; for all women, that the laws may be changed which subject a true woman, a devoted wife, a faithful mother, to such mental agonies as I have endured, and shall endure till I die.”

In a later letter she says, ”I now have his [the guardian's] solemn promise that he will not remove her from my control. To some extent my sufferings are allayed; and yet never, till she arrives at the age of twenty-one, shall I fully trust.” I wish that mothers who dwell in sheltered and happy homes would try to bring to their minds the condition of a mother whose possession of her only child rests upon the ”promise” of a comparative stranger. We should get beyond the meaningless cry, ”I have all the rights I want,” if mothers could only remember that among these rights, in most States of the Union, the right of a widowed mother to her child is not included.

By strenuous effort, the law on this point has in Ma.s.sachusetts been gradually amended, till it now stands thus: The father is authorized to appoint a guardian by will; but the powers of this guardian do not ent.i.tle him to take the child from the mother.

”The guardian of a minor ... shall have the custody and tuition of his ward; and the care and management of all his estate, except that the father of the minor, if living, and in case of his death the mother, they being respectively competent to transact their own business, shall be ent.i.tled to the custody of the person of the minor and the care of his education.”[2]

Down to 1870 the cruel words ”while she remains unmarried” followed the word ”mother” in the above law. Until that time, the mother if remarried had no claim to the custody of her child, in case the guardian wished otherwise; and a very painful scene once took place in a Boston court-room, where children were forced away from their mother by the officers, under this statute, in spite of her tears and theirs; and this when no sort of personal charge had been made against her. This could not now happen in Ma.s.sachusetts, but it might still happen in some other States. It is true that men are almost always better than their laws; but while a bad law remains on the statute-book it gives to any unscrupulous man the power to be as bad as the law.

[Footnote 1: Gen. Statutes R.I., chap. 154, sect. 1]

[Footnote 2: Public Statutes, chap. 139, sect. 4.]

V

SOCIETY

”Place the s.e.xes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe morality gives that essential charm to woman which educates all that is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing, breeds courtesy and learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate; so that I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.”--EMERSON, Society and Solitude, p. 21.

FOAM AND CURRENT

Sometimes, on the beach at Newport, I look at the gayly dressed ladies in their phaetons, and then at the foam which trembles on the breaking wave, or lies palpitating in creamy ma.s.ses on the beach. It is as pretty as they, as light, as fresh, as delicate, as changing; and no doubt the graceful foam, if it thinks at all, fancies that it is the chief consummate product of the ocean, and that the main end of the vast currents of the mighty deep is to yield a few glittering bubbles like those. At least, this seems to me what many of the fair ladies think, as to themselves.

Here is a nation in which the most momentous social and political experiment ever tried by man is being worked out, day by day. There is something ocean-like in the way in which the great currents of life, race, religion, temperament are here chafing with each other, safe from the storms through which all monarchical countries may yet have to pa.s.s. As these great currents heave, there are tossed up in every watering-place and every city in America, as on an ocean beach, certain pretty bubbles of foam; and each spot, we may suppose, counts its own bubbles brighter than those of its neighbors, and christens them ”society.”

It is an unceasing wonder to a thoughtful person, at any such resort, to see the unconscious way in which fas.h.i.+onable society accepts the foam, and ignores the currents. You hear people talk of ”a position in society,” ”the influential circles in society,” as if the position they mean were not liable to be s.h.i.+fted in a day; as if the essential influences in America were not mainly to be sought outside the world of fas.h.i.+on. In other countries it is very different. The circle of social caste, whose centre you touch in London, radiates to the farthest sh.o.r.es of the British empire; the upper cla.s.s controls, not merely fas.h.i.+on, but government; it rules in country as well as city; genius and wealth are but its tributaries.

Wherever it is not so, it is because England is so far Americanized. But in America the social prestige of the cities is nothing in the country; it is a matter of the pavement, of a three-mile radius.

Go to the farthest borders of England: there are still the ”county families,” and you meet servants in livery. On the other hand, in a little village in northern New Hamps.h.i.+re, my friend was visited in the evening by the landlady, who said that several of their ”most fas.h.i.+onable ladies” had happened in, and she would like to show them her guest's bonnet. Then the different cities ignore each other: the rulers of select circles in New York may find themselves n.o.bodies in Was.h.i.+ngton, while a Was.h.i.+ngton social pa.s.sport counts for as little in New York. Boston and Philadelphia affect to ignore both; and St. Louis and San Francisco have their own standards.

The utmost social prestige in America is local, provincial, a matter of the square inch: it is as if the foam of each particular beach along the seacoast were to call itself ”society.”