FRAUDULENT ADOPTION.
E are not about, of course, to remark on the extremely
disagreeable case which begins to fill the columns of the daily papers, and threatens to attain the proportions of a cause célebre, It would be impossible to do so without criticisms on the evidence, which would be unjust as well as illegal, the pre- sent rule in all Courts, though preposterously severe as regards civil cases, being almost indispensable in criminal trials. The accused is not to be tried in his or her absence by a jury of journalists, who do not see the witnesses as they speak. But the prosecution "Gooch v. Gooch" must raise in every mind a feeling of surprise at the extreme rarity, in this country, at all events, of charges of this particular kind. One would have expected a priori that substitution—the invention, as it were, of much- desired offspring—would be, in a country of entails and settle- ments, one of the most frequent forms of crime. England— for we believe the law, though not the practice, in Scotland, is different—is the only country in Europe in which Adoption is not recognised by law, and childless parents are forbidden to confer, even on close relatives, including illegitimate children, the status of children of the house. Adoption is common enough, but it is sanctioned only by opinion, and that not completely, the law conferring on the adopted no rights, granting them no pro- equivalent to 'verification,' the complaint, though relevant, is un- tection, and taxing them in the event of inheritance in the full founded ; for we are guided by no other reason in attributing thought I dues exacted from other strangers. The invention of children
must often be a temptation to the childless, and the temptation would seem to be strengthened by the peculiarities of our law. The whole future of a family constantly depends upon the birth of an heir. Not only do honours and social distinctions con- stantly pass away to relatives as distant as strangers, and possibly more disliked, but estates pass with them, till cases are possible in which the daughters of a wealthy Peer may be left, by an unex- pected death, in helpless poverty. A young widow may be stripped of her home and her position in a moment for the benefit of a man she has never seen, and occasionally, in defiance of every sentiment of natural justice, because there is no child to inherit the husband's wealth. In one case in Scotland, now generations old, a dukedom and a huge estate would have passed away from a family, but for the birth of a posthumous child, whose legitimacy became, probably on that account, a subject of the most bitter contest. So strongly indeed does the temptation appeal to the imagination, that in one celebrated instance a whole nation believed the crime to have been committed, and a throne which otherwise might have been preserved was overset in consequence. Nothing alienated the English masses from James II. like their belief in his fraudulent adoption of an heir, a belief for which there was absolutely no evidence, except the perception that the birth of an heir would be very convenient to the Church of Rome, and which endured for years, in the teeth of testimony that would have convinced any modern jury. Quite recently indeed writers of fiction have seized upon the offence as the basis for most exciting plots, and have made their stories depend upon the invention of children and the changing of children, until readers have grown weary of the idea, and a novel with a child changed at nurse as its hero, is pronounced, for that reason alone, unread- able.
Yet it may, we imagine, be taken as certain that the offence is excessively uncommon. The charge does not come up in the Courts once in a generation, and is rumoured in society even less frequently. One striking case used to he generally believed, but the popular notion rested upon no evidence, and was at total variance with the reckless profusion with which the great Peer supposed to be a changeling dissipated his wealth, to the injury of heirs who would never have lost millions to protect an im- postor. The operation of some strong counter-acting feelings is found to be sufficient to prevent illicit adoption, until the suspicion that it ever occurs has died away from men's minds, and Stuart 11rortley, the last great personage certainly known to have made the attempt, is summarily set down as a man in whom hereditary insanity had been latent for years, revealing itself at last in that effort to annoy his detested relatives. The crime, in the first place, is improbable, except among the very wealthy, who alone can be tempted by it, and who have every reason not to run the risk involved in every great fraud. For it is fraud, though the perpetrators probably think that it is only a breach of a particu- larly unjust law. No one would doubt this, if the offence were in form, as it is in substance, the theft of a deed conferring a re- versionary interest in a parcel of Consols ; and, indeed, we do not know that it is questioned, except by novelists, who always, we notice, let off characters guilty of it, for the sake of their help in clearing up matters in the third volume. The wealthy detest fraud, for reasons supplementary to their principles, just as pea- sant proprietors, for reasons also supplementary to their prin- ciples, detest petty larceny, with a vigour which in France, Switzerland, and India frequently has a direct effect on law. Bankers hate forgery as other people do not, and the wealthy, protected against other forms of plunder, acquire an accentuated contempt and dislike for scientific swind- ling,—one reason at least, though not the best or the most influential, for the social horror of cheating at cards. Then illicit adoption affronts the idea of pedigree, which in England is among the classes likely to settle estates almost an instinct, and perceptible in the most curious way in families which, according to Herald's rules, have just no pedigree at all. They have as much pride in family peculiarities and separatenesses as Spanish grandees have in their family histories, a form of family pride which, if we may trust American literature, is very intense in the United States, and deserves some day a separate description. " We Smiths have always been silent people." The husband and wife inclined to that form of boasting, if it is boasting, or to that form of self-criticism, will never adopt, legally or otherwise. Parents wish their supposed children to be worthy of them- selves, and as they can adopt fraudulently only deserted children, or illegitimate children, or the children of the very
poor, do not antecedently rely upon their worthiness. And finally, the offence, unless protected by very unusual circumstances, is extremely difficult of commission. There must be a child, to begin with, and a child exactly old enough ; and there must be either confederate nurses, doctors, and the like, or such an absence of them, as happened in the case of Mary of Modena, as of itself awakes suspicion. There is in most cases the perpetual annoy- ance caused by the child's unlikeness to its parents, which though, perhaps, unperceived by neighbours, is very patent to those who have committed the fraud ; and a perpetual danger of discovery, from the feeling of the real mother,—a dread to be faced through life, as well as that more subtle dread which can hardly be absent from the imaginary mother,—the dread that the child whose life begins, as it were, with a crime, will in some way or other be in itself the earthly retribution. Safety is essential, or the object of the adoption is defeated, and there never can be safety. In the historic case, for example, the dynasty would never have felt safe for an hour, the facts, or a strong suspicion of the facts, being certain to ooze out. At all events, this form of fraud, though it must often be singularly tempting in a country like this, is singularly infrequent, as infrequent as per- sonation.
One potentate in the world always reigns by virtue of a fraudu- lent adoption, and we have always wondered what became of his earthly parents. Does the mother of a Dalai Lama live to know that her son is reigning over what must be all her world, and does he know her ; or is he from the first educated to forget his earthly connections, and brought up always'as a semi-divine or self-existent personage ? And according to what occult theory, or guided by what ancient tradition, do the great Lamas choose the child iu whom they profess to believe, and probably do believe, yet whom they must know to be so very different from what they say ? Do they adhere to a family, as the one likeliest to produce reincarnations, or are they guided by traditional signs in the child, or is it a mere lottery ? They tell their disciples that they choose by certain books of divination, but if they do, how is it that the Court of Pekin always knows, as it is believed in Thibet to know, pretty well where the choice of the priesthood will fall? If they really make a lottery of the adoption—that is, search and search till they find a child answer- ing to the conditions laid down in their books—what a curious state their minds must be in. For they must believe enough in their own theory of incarnation, or rather of visible transmigra- tion, to avoid the strong temptation to select for themselves, yet not believe quite enough to think that Buddha can dispense with the help of fraud. The child, never five years old, is " tested " in a very sensible way, questions being asked him to which only his predecessor could, on the theory, reply ; and the child, of course, is taught to make the required answers. He calls, for example, for a bell which his predecessor used, and which is not in the room,—an idea that could not be self-developed. Somebody must teach him, and who is it? and does that somebody, after teaching him, still believe that the transmigrated soul of the last Grand Lama is living in the child, and obey him as the representative of Buddha on earth ? Of course, the theory of imposture explains everything, but it has never, in such cases, been found accurate yet ; and it is much more probable that as Brahmins honestly think an image divine because they have breathed into it the divine essence or concrete consecration, so the great Lamas think their own fraud one of the over-ruled means for discovering the right child. Certainly that is the strangest example in this world of fraudulent adop- tion, and a student of history is scarcely silly if he wishes to know whether or no the Mongol priesthood have any guiding-line of selec- tion, or whether it is really true that any Thibetan child born at the right time may sleep a peasant and rise up a sovereign, armed with mystic prerogatives, and fenced by a reverence which, if a Dalai Lama ever turned up with an original mind, as a Mikado has certainly done, might affect for ever the fate, not only of Thibet, but of India and China. A Dalai Lama, the adopted child of the priesthood, who meant mischief, and revealed that the Supreme had once more given earth to the tribes who believe in him, would affect a good many civilised budgets. Such a man did turn up once, and made Lord Auckland an offer which, if it had been accepted, would have made our present Central-Asian questions seem very small. Had he carried out his plan, and ridden over Asia, he would have been, without a doubt, the greatest adopted child known in the history of the world.
Previous page
