"KILLING NO MURDER."
(TO TUN EDITOR OF TUB " SPIICTATOR."J
would ask for space in your columns to raise a point hitherto unnoticed in the question of child-murder discussed in the Spectator of October 3rd. While defending the principle of severe punishment for child-murder, I would compare it to a gardener who cuts the leaves and flowers off a weed and ignores the root in the earth. When a boy and girl go pilfering apples, does the owner of the orchard —assuming he is a man of justice—catch and punish the girl, who has the basket of fruit on her arm, and let the boy go scot-free P The woman who murders her child has first been degraded, and then driven to desperation. Who has done this ? If, when the mother was brought under the law for punishment of her crime, the participator in, and often the originator of, the miserable situation were brought there too, and awarded a punishment equal to his offence, we might then feel that the law was dealing equitably with the case. As it now stands, false sentiment and false sympathy are awaked in the bosom of the unthinking members of the public, their instinct causing them to revolt somehow against so inadequate a handling of the situation. How can women run the white flag of self-respect up the mast of morality when men pin it to the ground with one foot, and no law of justice intervenes ? Until men recognise their equal responsibility with women in this matter, and join hands with them to work the pulley which runs that white flag up, the newspapers will continue to overflow with sordid and hideous stories of women killing either themselves or their babies, or both, to evade the burden laid on them by the hand of so-called human justice. They cannot face the ordeal of bearing alone the result of a sin caused by two. Once it is recognised—which it must be very soon—that a man is as gravely responsible as a woman for the moral progress and elevation of the human race, we may look hopefully for a steady rise of the standards of moral living, and, as a certain result of the same, the decay, and ultimately visible decrease, of immorality and crime.—I am, Sir, &c.,
A READER OF THE "SPECTATOR."
[Of course the man who deserts the woman he has made a mother has a terrible responsibility, and wherever possible we should like to bring home that responsibility to him in the sternest way. Unless, however, we admit that two wrongs make a right, we dare not tell the woman that she may slaughter her baby with impunity because its father and her lover betrayed her and acted like a coward. A blow, a sneer, an act of meanness, cruelty, or lust, may be some sort of excuse for the sudden access of mad anger which leads to murder. But remember that she who kills a helpless, defenceless, and necessarily inoffensive child has no such excuse. To compare the offence of begetting an illegitimate child with its murder seems to 118 the most horrible of sophistries. We do not desire for a moment to condone the moral offence of the woman or the man, but at any rate they may plead the excuse of imperious animal instinct for their want of self-control under temptation. In the case, however, of the woman who murders her child the animal instinct is helping her to resist the temptation, not urging her to yield to it. In any instance where it could be shown that the man had suggested to the woman that she should get rid of the child we would punish him with the utmost severity. No one, however, can be excused for crimes he or she has committed because some one else has gone unpunished for another and different offence. That would be to violate the essential idea of justice.—En. Spectator.]
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