PREFACE TO VOLUME TWO. The decision in Stakes' Case (p. 1) that cruelty to an animal is a crime, per se, was humane and right. Unfortunately, kindness and mercy to animals was not permanently established as a principle of law by this ruling and public opinion was for many years quite indifferent. But only one year after it was made the most devoted and active friend of the brute creation this Continent has known, Henry Burgh, was born in this very city, and in 1866 was founded by him the first American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.1 When he began his work no State or Territory in the United States had a single statute relating to the protection of animals from cruelty. In less than twenty-four years all of them had adopted substantially the very laws which he had obtained from the Legislature of New York. But the pity is that this was necessary, for had other judges in New York and in the rest of the country declared the law as 1 BURGH, Henry. (1823-1888.) Born in New York City. Student in Columbia College, which he left before. graduation to travel in Europe for five years. Secretary to American Legation, Russia, 1862. While traveling in the East he witnessed many instances of cruelty to animals and having made the acquaintance of Lord Hambley, the President of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, he returned to the United States determined to devote the remainder of his days to the interests of dumb creatures. The American Society was founded in 1866 and he became its first President and later established branches in every part of the Union. He never would receive a salary or money reward and determined to lay by a portion of his income to the work of speaking for those who could not speak for themselves. He was the author of several stories and plays. V Recorder Riker did in the case of Stakes, such statutes would not have been needed. The whole story of the Dorr Rebellion is told in this Trial (p. 5) and in the interesting essay of Mr. Eaton (p. 15). Degey's Case (p. 171) is a reminder that the man in the pulpit is the only orator and debater to whom the law under no circumstances permits the hearer to make a reply. Bathsheba Spooner (p. 175) was certainly an Eighteenth Century Lucretia Borgia. Had she lived a hundred and fifty years later she would have suffered little inconvenience as the result of her escapade with her young lover and the British soldiers.2 Her picture would have been in all the newspapers and she would have been in great demand by a certain class of theatrical managers. But the Jury of Matrons had no mercy, though their verdict was afterwards shown to have been wrong. For this reason the terror which her punishment was intended to produce was neutralized by pity for her sufferings... Her appearance was so calm and her end so peaceful that it was forgotten how deeply her hands had been stained in blood. This and the mistake made by the Jury of Matrons caused the tragedy to be long talked of among the people and her wickedness came to be forgotten in the admiration excited by her beauty and her fortitude and in the sympathy which her unfortunate condition aroused in every wife and mother. Nevertheless, says her old biographer, "the case doth furnish an illustration of the truth that the most revolting crimes have been 2 Within a couple of years in the City of Chicago a number of women have been acquitted of the murder of their husbands. committed by the fair hands of women and that when a woman oversteps the modesty of her position and breaks loose from the restraint of the law, her whole character is changed and her affections are inverted. No criminals are so hardened, none go through the ordeal of a public trial or endure a death of shame with more calmness and apparent innocence than the woman." When Enoch Arden, returning to his native port after his shipwreck and the months spent on the solitary island in the mid-ocean, and learning that after waiting for years and believing him dead, his wife had married his old rival, crept up the village street at night, and looking in at the window, "beheld His wife his wife no more and saw the babe, Lord of his rights and of his children's love, Because things seen are mightier than things heard, There speech and thought and nature failed a little All down the long and narrow street he went, Beating it in upon his weary brain, As tho' it were the burden of a song Never to tell her; never to let her know." Van Pelt (p. 202) was not a hero of the Tennyson kind. Returning from the war and finding his wife married again he consoled himself very soon by marrying, too. But he had forgotten to take account of the Law. Perhaps he had consulted a lawyer and received the discouraging answer that Stephen Blackford did in Hard Times. Stephen applied to his lawyer, Bounderby, as to how he should get rid of his wife. "It costs money," said Bounderby, "a mint of money. You'd have to go to Doctors Commons with a suit, and you'd have to go to a Court of Common Law with a suit, and you'd have to go to the House of Lords with a suit, and you'd have to get an Act from Parliament to enable you to marry again and it would cost you, if it was a case of very plain sailing, I suppose from one thousand to fifteen hundred pounds, perhaps twice the money." But the Court, taking into consideration the provocation, was somewhat easy on Van Pelt, though the Judge did not see fit to criticize the divorce laws as applied to the common people as did the celebrated and witty Mr. Justice Maule when he had a case before him in the London Courts a few years later. A man who had been deserted by a worthless wife and had married again had been convicted of bigamy and was called up for sentence before Maule, who addressed him as follows: "Prisoner at the bar, you have been convicted before me of what the law regards as a very serious and grave offence, that of going through the marriage ceremony a second time while your wife was still alive. You may plead in mitigation of your conduct that she was given to dissipation and drunkenness, that she proved herself a curse to her household while she remained mistress of it, and that she had latterly deserted you; but I am not permitted to recognize any such plea. You entered into a solemn engagement to take her for better or for worse, and if you got infinitely more of the latter, as you appear to have done, it was your duty to patiently submit. You say you took another person to be your wife because you were left with several young children, who required the care and protection of some one who might act as a substitute for the parent who had deserted them; but the law makes no allowances for bigamists with large families. Had you taken the other female to live with you as your concubine you would never have been interferred with by the law. But your crime consists in having, to use your own language, preferred to make an honest woman of her. Another of your irrational excuses is that your wife had committed |