fathers. They can be given away, or willed away, from the mother. That
this almost never happens is due largely to the fact that, as a rule, no
one except the mother of a child is especially keen to possess it.

It is due also in large measure to the fact that courts of justice are
growing reluctant to administer such archaic laws.

The famous Tillman case is an example. Senator Ben Tillman of South
Carolina has one son,--a dissipated, ill-tempered, and altogether
disreputable man, whose wife, after several miserable years of married
life, left him, taking with her their two little girls. South Carolina
allows no divorce for any cause. The sanctity of the marriage tie is
held so lightly in South Carolina that the law permits it to be abused
at will by the veriest brute or libertine. Mrs. Tillman could not
divorce her husband, so she took her children 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