Where is the Man?

White Ribbon, Volume 10, Issue 120, 15 May 1905, Page 7

Where is the Man?

Again the glaring inequality of the illegitimacy laws (or want ot laws) is pressed home to us by the case of a young girl, charged before Judge Edwards at Gisborne, on May Ist, with the murder of her new-born infant, she having abandoned it on the roadside to die. The Judge charged the Grand Jury that it was their duty to find a true bill, and said that, whether the death sentence were carried out or not, it would be his subsequent duty to pass that sentence upon her. We readily believe that, having vindicated the letter of the law in these words, the Judge shared the general relief

when the Grand Jury deliberately threw out the bill against the sobbing girl, who even then had confessed in open court. We are all glad that the Gisborne jury was better than the law ; we see in this, we trust, something more than illogical sentiment; we see ir it a pro test against the barbarous injustice which lays the whole shame and the wdiole parental responsibility on a weak creature already broken by physical suffering. Can we, in the 20th century, acquiesce longer in this wretched system, which penalises the mother and the innocent child, letting the greater culprit go free? It is not a complex inequality, like many which bear on women ; there is no reason why one comprehensive bill should not be drafted and passed in one session, providing for registration in the father’s name, maintenance of illegitimate children on an equal financial basis with lawful ch.ldren, and, in such cases as this, the ariaignment of the father as an accessory to the child s murder.

How long, then, shall we pervert justice by tolerating a system which the conscience of the community has outgrown ? For the merciful supiness of a jury cannot be regarded as a satisfactory method of dealing with so serious a question as the manslaughter of infants.