Heritages of the Lord

THE sun shone through the high windows on the judge’s yellow hair. It touched the calf-skin volumes on his orderly desk. It glowed through the folds of the large silk flag above the bookcase. Yes, the court-room was tolerable. But not the sun itself could brighten the sordid room across the hall, — that room packed with grimy, lowering fathers, grimy, worried mothers, grimy, sullen, abnormal children.

‘Next case,’ said the judge curtly.

A starchy probation officer laid papers before him. She looked like an animated ledger. She, if any one, could convince you that we are made of carbohydrates and proteids, and that the joy of life is a mere figure of speech.

The ushers fluttered about a grimy caravan that came in from across the hall. They ranged their charges before the court. In front were a small boy and girl. Their clothes seemed impregnated with the dust of ages. The little girl’s dress alone would have sufficed to silt up the multitudinous seas.

‘Your Honor, Mr. Housel asks the court to commit these children to homes,’ said the probation officer.

The judge fumbled the papers. He turned calm, blue eyes on the father.

‘I committed two of Mr. Housel’s children last year,’ he remarked.

The man’s hat, once black, was now green. He turned it round in his stiff fingers. With a face all anxious goodness, he watched the judge.

‘The mother can’t keep them from running the streets,’ stated the probation officer. ‘She’s feeble-minded. She has no control over them.’

The grimy woman plucked at her husband’s sleeve, and muttered unintelligibly.

‘How about the father?’ asked the judge.

Shuffling his lumpy boots, the man cast his eyes on the judge’s blue silk socks and patent leather shoes.

‘He’s all right,’ the probation officer replied. ‘Sober, kind, hard-working. He makes two dollars a day regularly.’

‘Why can’t he control the children?’

‘He’s away all day, your Honor. He works on the railroad.’

‘Can’t the mother be advised? Is there no hope of improved conditions? ’

‘No, your Honor. She’s feeble-minded.’

The judge frowned at his neat fingernails. He addressed the father, mildly.

‘Where does your wife come from?’

The grimy man lifted his gaze from the blue silk socks to the blue eyes.

‘From Virginia, Judge,’ he stammered.

‘You married her in Virginia?’

‘Yes, Judge.’

‘How old was she?’

‘Seventeen.’

Evidently this draggled creature, who looked as if she had been salvaged from an ash-barrel, was actually seventeen, once upon a time.

‘Virginia allows feeble-minded persons to marry,’ commented the probation officer.

The probation officer was clean and practical. Life showed her only its black and white. No dusty sectionhand had ever courted her in Virginia in May. And yet perhaps even probation officers are marriageable at seventeen. Now, with unemotional ease, she discussed the feeble mind of the grimy woman in the grimy woman’s presence.

‘You wish me to commit these children as I did the others last year?’ the judge turned to the father.

‘Yes, Judge.’

The woman plucked again at her husband’s sleeve, inarticulate.

‘She wants to keep the baby,’ he ventured to the probation officer. He dared not address this bold demand to the court.

‘Which is the baby?’ inquired the judge.

‘The baby is n’t here,’ explained the probation officer. ‘It’s a little baby. Only a few months old. Born since you committed the others, last year.’

‘What do you think?’ the judge asked the probation officer.

‘Oh, she might as well keep the baby,’ she conceded, indifferently. ‘She can’t do it any harm, yet.’

The grimy woman’s face relaxed its tension.

The judge signed commitment papers. The hearing was over.

‘Next case,’ commanded the court as the grimy family filed out.

‘ But you can’t let her keep the baby when it gets older,’ protested the visitors to the probation officer.

She shrugged.

‘By that time there’ll be another baby,’ she predicted.

‘For the state to support!’

‘For the state to support. Exactly.’

‘And the mother feeble-minded!’ The visitors were horrified.

‘They’re all subnormal,’ added the probation officer.

And, remembering great families that have died out in Virginia, the visitors asked, ‘ What of a state that lets its best stock perish, and permits a feebleminded woman to bear five children?’

‘Don’t blame Virginia,’ remonstrated the probation officer. ‘ She just happened to be from Virginia. Plenty of other states do the same thing. They won’t restrict the liberty of the citizen.’

The visitors exclaimed indignantly.

‘Laws are much occupied with the rights of citizens. The right to be born, especially. Why should the law overlook the right of the citizen not to be born feeble-minded?’

Nobody seemed to know the answer.

‘ You say the father of those children works hard?’ continued the visitors.

‘He earns good wages,’ agreed the probation officer.

‘Should n’t the law have protected him and his descendants from this blight? If he had known that his children would be defective, can any one suppose he would have married such a woman? How could he know that she was feeble-minded? And he had a right to know.’

The probation officer smiled commiseratingly. She was not paid to worry about the law.