the confidante of her mature son in all his follies and his plans, which so consecrates filial piety that it is the one virtue which it is not permitted to smile at, and which so glorifies the family surroundings that the emigrant, however prosperous, always wanders back at last to the village in which his race is settled. It will be very marvellous if the present cordial relations of parents and children in France survive marriages of inclination, and their correlative, the law making marriage dissoluble.
Till very lately the law was careful not to interfere between parents and children. It was held that the parents, so long as they cared for the lives of their offspring, had an absolute right to decide how they should be brought up. The single exception in England to this rule has been in the case of heirs to property whose future social condition might be impaired if they were left in the hands of an immoral or atheistic parent.[1] It was under the operation of this principle that Shelley was deprived of his children, and there seems no reason for supposing that the law was not administered with perfect fairness in that particular case. Indeed, there has been a more complete instance of its application in later times, when daughters were taken from a mother's guardianship and transferred to their father's care, because the odium attaching to their mother's opinions might affect their prospects in marriage.[2] The anomaly which the English law embodied was too monstrous to endure. On the one hand, any child not entitled to property was left absolutely in the
- ↑ In the case of Wellesley v. The Duke of Beaufort it was stated, however, that in reality the jurisdiction of the Court was over all the children in the realm, and was only not exercised in all cases because it was not all children who possessed an estate which required the protection of the Court.
- ↑ The case of Besant v. Besant.
