The Washington herald., 1917-08-13

misery-for she was a stranger in
strange land-her heart had set
itself with more than the ordinary
mother devotion upon this babe. a
beautiful little boy. Her own family
and friends were thousands of
miles away. This child was all that
she had to love-the only frail little
spar of happiness that she had to
cling to in the great black sea
of misery on which her life boat had
been wrecked at the very beginning
Of it's voyage.
She asked the courts to award
her the custody of the child so
that she might go back to Chile and
dwell among her own people, and
have the comfort OF her moIher's
love and sympathy. The court re-
fused TO permit the child to be
taken out of America and ordered
that he would live alternate months
with the mother and father, and 1t
was when she believed that her
former husband was deliberately
breaking faith with this arrange
ment and that he was planning to
keep the boy that the desperate
mother fired her fatal shot.
But before this she had been mad
Gened by the little boys artless tales
of the life he led with the father.
for unknowing what he told, the little
iour-ycar-Old baby lisped of beautiful
ladies' to whose perfumed apartments
his father took him, and OF bar
keepers that he had been taught to
cell by their names. and of the ten
der mercies of hired servants who
nut him to bed when his father was
away from home at night.
OF course there can be no justifca-
tion fer murder. The individual can
not be permitted to take vengeance
for individual wrongs. That way
would lie chaos and the overthrow
of all law and order. The law must
take its cold. hard way. but in the
case Of this poor tortured woman who
has slain the faithless husband who
had not only broken her heart. but
she believed had taken her child from
her, there will stand back of her
the sympathy of every woman in the
land who will pray that strict JUS
tice will turn aside its face and let
mercy reign in its stead.
Women have no bitterer complaint
AGAINST the law than the way in
which it deals with them about their
children. In many States the law
gives the child entirely to its father,
in several until very recently it was
even possible for a man to will his
unborn child away to a stranger. and
in most of the States it has taken
long hard fight to get laws passed
that made the mother who bore a
child equal guardian Of it with its
father.
And this in the face of nature that
makes the mother passion. even Of
the dumb brute, the strongest instinct
of its being Molest its young and
the gentlest animal will turn upon
you and fight to the death, and amonS
human beings it is the mother love
that is the one blind, changeless pas
sion that endures all things, that suf-
fers all things, and that no i'll treat
ment can kill.
The lover must see beauty and charm
to inspire devotion. Mother love can
wrap itself so closely about the most
hideous deformity that it does not
even perceive its ugliness. The love
of man for woman, and woman for
man. dies of cruelty and neglect, but
the more a mothers heart is SCARED
and bruised the tenderer it grows.
1t Is the mother who stands out
side of the prison door waiting to take
her child, sin-scarred, disgraced, back
to her bosom, an outcast from every
| thing but mothers love. It is a