“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 entitled 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 Massachusetts, 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 sexes 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 masses 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 pass.  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.”