Litchfield enquirer., 1871-05-04
What 1t Teaches.

LitchfSld. Thursday. May 4. 1871
 What It Teaches. S
 In our local column will be found briei rssame of the facts brought to light by the arrest and trial of Joel W. Perkins, oi Cornwall, for the crime of murder. While the publication of the sickening details of =.nnsha >tFial is of doubtful propriety and utility, to- say the least, we owe it to our readers to let them know what an awful and continued career of crime has run it's course, unchecked. for years. in their midst.
 Men of weak moral natures and almost uhcohtrollal1le passions must sometimes be born even in enlightened New England. c Bat that their evil natures should be al- loved to blossom and bear such an abund- anoe of criminal fruit, that they should < drag down nany others into almost equal ihfamy. that their crimes should go on at accelerating rates for years without protest in an intelligent and Christian community, almost passes belief. It is an ofeense at which Society may we'll stand aghast. for 1t is she who is the real criminal. That this man has ripened into such monster. is the direct result of that relic of barbarism, the despotic, feudal constitution of the she Family. To those who are fond of re- peating that "Every mans house is his Castle" "Evsry family must have it's ab- solute master and head with whom society and the law should not interfere, " this hor. rible case must reveal, like flash of light. ming, the evil possibilities of their petted relation. A vife, physically inferior, re- peatsdly subjected to violence and in just fear of her life, maintains twenty years silence, while her brutish husband raises a family of brutish children, hardly more cul- pable for the. crimes they commit than the beasts of the field" Had the wife, who alone of those seven women knew right from wrong, been trained up to independ- ence instead of trained down to depend. ence; had she been taught that it was her duty to assert the right, and not her duty Co submit to wrong, such terrific success sion of crimes would have been impossible. Earthermors. has a child no rights fa- ther is bound to respect? The State makes pretence of compelling fathers to send their children to the common schools. Had that law been anything more than a pretence, there would long since have. been . srebellion against atrocities to which only the grossest ignorance could have sub. mitted. That this father~had suffered a family. of seven children to grow up with out learning to read, was. or should have been. known to the authorities of the five or six different towns in which he resided. That he was doing some of them another most heinous wrong has been known in Cornwall for years, yet, because he was iathsr,he was allowed ''to do what he chose with his ownp'
 It is the natural impulse of humanity to glance for an instant into such an abyss of infarny as this, to turn away sickened. and to banish the subject forever after from ss~sss--~AA- 0uOa- ---.rsa is bUtn weak and wicked. It is the duty of the true citizen to find out the cause of such awful moral portents, and, if possible, their rem edy. The case under consideration is, we are glad to think, about the worst possible; but we must not blind our eyes to the fact that it is only the worst of great class of eases. There are all sorts of husbands and fathers in this State of Connecticut. By impreceptible graduations they lead all the way downward from that model of gener- osity and upselfishness about which we read SO often in conservative works, to the brutal tyrant who haunts the back streets of the city and fills the novels and poor districts of the country with tyrannies and brutalities that emulate, if they do not equal, the crimes of this Cornwall murder er. In countries where other despotic re. lations have been established by law or custom, similar grades will always be found to exist. Free society may in nearly every case abolish such relations. Where it can. not totally destroy them, it can at least limit their extent, mitigate their evils, and. above ell, regard them with an ster- nal distrust.