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And the commentator spoke elaborately of the duty of the father to "maintain, educate, and protect" his child, when as a matter of fact he could not educate, there being no schools; his duty to protect gave him simply a defense in case of certain action against him; and his duty to maintain consisted chiefly in an obligation not to let his child come on the poor rate. Kent, for example, the great American commentator, who saw that only by the provision of ample school facilities could the parental duty be performed, speaks of the duty "as of imperfect obligation in the eye of the municipal law, but of very great importance to the welfare of the state."

As a matter of fact, the relations of husband and wife, of father and child, were in the earlier law those of power without corresponding legal responsibility. The principle that power held by one individual over another is to be exercised as a trust is a modern principle. And just as the warden of the prison took his fees, so in earlier times the guardian of the minor and the husband who had his wife "under coverture" took the gains incident to the relationship.

The common law of the family group can be briefly stated. Marriage suspended the legal existence of the wife and gave to the husband rights in relation first, to her person, so that he could determine the domicile; second, to fix the standard of life; third, to discipline her; and fourth, to command her services, marital and domestic, or if she rendered services for pay to another, to claim her earnings.

In the matter of property he took, first, her personal goods in ownership, and second, her real property for use and control. When children came, he was entitled to their custody, to determine their education and care, while she, entitled, in the words of Blackstone, "to reverence and respect," lacked all authority. In return, he was under a duty to supply her with necessaries, that is, those things suitable to the station in which he placed her, and to keep the children off the poor rates. This was the law of a very rough and rude community, and became nothing less than unendurable when the intricacies of family relationships multiplied.

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"Well, she's my wife, aint she? It is no matter what I done to her. Look 'ere, 'as a man a right to his own wife an' children, you tell me that!" In these words Galsworthy sets out the amazement of the young husband and father who is astonished at a social worker's suggestion that he owes any duty, "I know what the law says. A man owns 'is wife, an' 'e owns 'is children."

In this terrible story Demos, Galsworthy reveals some of the ugliness and brutality of that law in its effect on the conditions of women's lives and on the habits of men's thoughts. Escape was found by the well-to-do through appeal to equity, theoretically the keeper of the king's conscience, in behalf of the weak and helpless, but in fact often the refuge of the rich and powerful. Through equity, a scheme was worked out for protecting a married woman who came into the matrimonial relationship with property "settled upon her" for her separate

use, or acquiring such goods after marriage by will or deed. In the same way, equity maintained the ultimate right of the state to discipline fathers; but, in general, the courts could and did enforce the rights of fathers rather than their duties.

From this summary it is perhaps clear that the statement of the law of status created by marriage requires considerable elaboration, involving as it does reference to two systems of courts. The same thing was true with reference to the termination of the relationship. While the law of marriage was all too simple, perhaps, since doubts were resolved in favor of legitimacy, divorce required the action of the ecclesiastical courts and, if absolute, of parliament itself. Here again the position of the rich was far more favorable than that of the poor.

In the United States it was impossible that a legal situation like that should last, and from 1847-48 on there was a steady stream of legislation in the various states giving to married women their so-called "property rights" and continuing in them with reference to that property the acting capacity enjoyed by the unmarried woman, the fême sole, as she was known at law. Along with these acts went also acts giving to mothers some rights in relation to their children, the so-called "equal guardianship" laws, though in relatively few states are they really equal in terms, and in fewer probably are they equal in the interpretation given them by the courts. These acts bestow new rights on the wife and mother and to that extent limit powers hitherto exercised by the husband and father. They do not, however, in themselves lay new affirmative duties on him toward either his wife or child. Nor do the married woman's property-rights laws generally lay duties on her toward her husband, or recognize the unity of the family and lay on the wife other obligations than those related to her new rights. The direction in which this development occurred is undoubtedly due to the fact that the escape from the restrictions of the common law was found by the way of ingenious devices of the lawyers who had in mind the difficulties of the well-todo, and to the fact that, while in general the same court exercised its extraordinary jurisdiction in behalf both of married women and of children, it did this by an appeal to two different sources of authority: one to an ancient general right claimed by the king to right the wrong of certain groups who had elsewhere no remedy, and the other in part at least to powers exercised over land and in certain specific ways generally described as of equitable character; so that the interests of the mother and of the child were never consolidated, as it were, into one body of equitable family law.

And yet, any attempt to bring to all children the benefits of modern social organization, to secure for them some share in the surplus resulting from the reorganization of industry, to get them into school, or bring about for them the possibility of decent urban life, could only reveal both the necessity of securing the cooperation of parents and the impossibility of securing that cooperation from all parents as a voluntary expression of parental, and especially paternal,

responsibility. And so legislation enabling interested persons, with the authority of the public agency, to enforce that moral parental responsibility which the commentators treat as so obvious and so universal, is embodied in the acts authorizing the separation from their families of neglected and vagrant children, and providing for the establishment or recognition of industrial and reformatory schools, allowing the court to order payments by the father for the support of his child, even when deprived of his child's companionship, and in the so-called "abandonment, non-support, and contributing to dependency and delinquency" laws, which turn failure to maintain a home at a level making for independence and good conduct into an offense against the criminal law.

The most universal and conspicuous attempt at bringing to bear on the home these modern standards of family relationship is found, of course, in the juvenile court legislation. For laws recognizing the principle of specialized treatment of certain groups of children have been enacted in every state, and courts have been authorized to become, through their probation staffs, public assistant parents, as it were, dealing with delinquent children and those about whose lives are found factors of demoralization, as a wise parent would wish to deal and as a competent parent would be able to deal.

But these are not the only points at which the older situation has been changed. There are the factory acts that, from the first, placed restrictions on the rights of parents to utilize the labor power of their young children; and the compulsory attendance laws place on the parents positive duties involving a considerable expense and setting for many families a new standard of comfort and of physical and mental well-being. And there are three other bodies of legislation to which attention must be briefly directed before the tale is ended.

The common law did not know the process of adoption, but in all the commonwealth the right of the natural parents to surrender and the right of foster parents to acquire by appropriate and formal action the rights of a parent in a young child have been recognized by statute.

So far, reference has been made only to family groups already established, without asking, When is a family a family? But in that connection it should be noticed that the law with reference to marriage is one of the subjects in which extensive revision has been found necessary. The commissioners on uniform laws drafted a model act, and securing its enactment is one of the important objects of the women's clubs and other social and civic groups who have become alarmed at the increasing lightness with which the matrimonial bonds are assumed and broken, while Lord Bryce says of the divorce legislation of the United States that it is "the largest, strangest, and perhaps the saddest body of legislative experiments in the sphere of family law which free self-governing communities have ever tried." The importance of the laws governing marriage and divorce has, of course, been especially called to the attention of family welfare workers through the research and publications of Miss Richmond and Mr. Hall, and their appeal for recognition of the essential brutality of the law now

operative in many states is fresh in the consciousness of all members of this division.

And finally, for this review, reference of the briefest kind must be made to the legislation directed toward the improvement of the status and condition of the child born out of wedlock. Of the barbarity of the old law and of the difficulties and intricacies of the undertaking to modify and amend it, none knows better than the members of the Family Welfare Division. There has obviously been expended an enormous volume of energy in securing the enactment of these laws, which must be obtained in each commonwealth, and by Congress for territory under the jurisdiction of the United States. The interest has been stimulated from various sources, e.g., the feminists, the legal reformers, social workers, etc., and the effort has therefore often been characterized by an accidental and haphazard aspect. The laws have often not been fitted into each other, and this, together with the differences that have characterized the attitude of the courts toward the original law and its varied amendments, has led to the establishment in many states of children's code commissions, looking to the codification of the law so that at least that portion affecting child care might take on unity, sequence, and comprehensiveness.

From this cursory enumeration it is clear that a very complicated and difficult task is in process of being worked out, namely, that of revolutionizing the legal character of an institution peculiarly delicate and difficult to alter, offering the resistance of conservatism, and subject to the inhibitions generally characterizing those in possession of power and authority which others are seeking to limit or abolish.

It is also probably obvious that the changes desired involve not only statutory enactment altering rights and duties, but the development of fine social and administrative devices to supplement parental effort or replace deficient parental care. In the great Wellesley case to which the student turns, the court pointed out that although there might be in the court the authority to interfere between parent and child, the court lacked agencies through which he could learn what was the right course to pursue (provision for what we should call the initial or antecedent investigation), and there were no such resources for treatment as, for example, the supervising probation service or provision for placing in foster homes or in appropriate institutions the children of neglecting parents. The development of those agencies, then, is a task essential to the fulfilment of the new legal purpose. What is involved in bringing this about can be realized only by those who have attempted to obtain first the private, and then the public, support for an adequate probation service. And yet neither the juvenile nor the domestic relations court can fully accomplish its work without such an agency to assist in the two ways indicated by the court in the Wellesley case referred to. The probation service, too, is probably more fully developed than the agencies for psychiatric diagnosis and treatment gradually becoming recognized as equally important, and suitable institutional provision lags behind both.

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And so far as these agencies have been set up, they are available usually only in restricted areas, the large cities, and only in the cases of the poor. For in a way the situation has been reversed; and whereas equity in the older days dealt only with the children who had special forms of property, today the most important modification and extension of equity-the juvenile court-is substantially available only in behalf of the children of the poor. This is due, however, to the limitations, not of the jurisdiction, but of the personality and courage, and often of time and energy of the court's agents. There is no inherent difficulty preventing the juvenile court through its probation officers from offering care and supervision to the child from the home rich in material goods but poor in the essential factors of sound child care.

But the difficulties of obtaining support and provision for such agencies are not the only difficulties. There is the fact that the personnel is not yet available. If one asks how far are the probation officers to whom is intrusted the supervision of the husbands on whom the hand of the law has fallen, husbands and fathers sometimes characterized as felons for doing things or leaving undone things that would have brought no obloquy on their fathers or grandfathers, adequate for these tasks, one would have to admit the frequent inadequacy of the group to interpret to the family the new obligations or to interpret to the community the results of the new treatment.

In the case of the juvenile court, it is certainly often true that the officer who is representative of the court in the readjustment of the family life is far from capable of that delicate dealing with domestic relationships and family situations that would alone justify the implications of compulsory interference.

Nor would the survey be in any wise complete without reference to some of the strange alignments against the effort. The old struggle between church and state seems renewed in some of the sectarian resistance offered to this legislation. With the enmity to this development shown by all the agencies organized for the exploitation of youth and recreation the family welfare worker is familiar. And with all this effort, as yet slight attempt has been made to provide with even such resources as the juvenile courts and courts of domestic relations enjoy, the courts before which divorce actions come and those who make the decisions in adoption cases. In fact, in several states adoption can still be accomplished by deed, and the rights of a child transferred and accepted exactly as interests in land are dealt with. It is obvious that the problem is an essentially difficult and challenging problem. And when we recall the necessity of working it out with forty-eight legislatures in relation to forty-eight judicial systems, the possibility of a truly national minimum seems very remote.

It is true that a committee of judges has been formed by the United States Children's Bureau at the suggestion of the National Probation Association and has recommended certain procedures to be adopted everywhere. For example, they recommend the creation of a court with very wide powers in dealing with questions of family breakdown. To many their proposal seems to risk too many

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