n and went to live quietly
at her parent's home in the city of Washington.

One day the father of the children, young Tillman, appeared at that
home, and in a fit of drunken resentment against his wife, kidnapped the
children. He could not care for the children, probably had no wish to
have them near him, but he took them back to South Carolina, and _gave_
them to his parents, made a present of a woman's flesh and blood and
heart to people who hated her and whom she hated in return.

Under the laws of South Carolina, under the printed statutes, young
Tillman had a perfect right to do this thing, and his father, a United
States Senator, upheld him in his act. Young Mrs. Tillman, however,
showed so little respect for the statutes that she sued her husband and
his parents to recover her babies. The judge before whom the suit was
brought was in a dilemma. There was the law--but also there was justice
and common sense. To the everlasting honor of that South Carolina judge,
justice and common sense triumphed, and he ruled that _the law was
unconstitutional._

There are other hardships in this law denying to mothers the right of
co-guardianship of their children. Two names signed to a child's working
papers is a pretty good thing sometimes, for it often happens that
selfish and lazy fathers are anxious to put their children to work,
when the mothers know they are far too young. A woman in Scranton,
Pennsylvania, told me, with tears filling her eyes, that her children
had been taken by their father to the silk mills as soon as they were
tall enough to suit a not too exacting foreman. "What could I say about
it, when he went and got the papers?" she sighed.

The father--not the mother--controls the services of his children. He
can collect their wages, and he does. Very, very often he squanders the
money they earn, and no one may interfere.

A family of girls in Fall River, Massachusetts, were met every pay day
at the doors of the mill by their father, who exacted of each one her
pay envelope, unopened. It was his regular day for getting drunk and
indulging in an orgy of gambling. Often more than half of the girls'
wages would have vanished before night. Twice the entire amount was
wasted in an hour. This kept on until the girls passed their childhood
and were mature enough to rebel successfully.

It is the father and not the mother that may claim the potential
services of a child.

Many times have these unjust laws been