r of the petitions
referred to them, they believe that the time has come when
certain alterations and amendments are, by common consent,
admitted as proper and necessary.

Your Committee recommend that the assent of the mother, if she be
living, be made necessary to the validity of any disposition
which the father may make of her child by the way of the
appointment of guardian or of apprenticeship. The consent of the
wife is now necessary to a deed of real estate in order to bar
her contingent interest therein; and there are certainly far more
powerful reasons why her consent should be necessary to the
conveyance or transfer of her own offspring to the care,
teaching, and control of another.

When the husband from any cause neglects to provide for the
support and education of his family, the wife should have the
right to collect and receive her own earnings and the earnings of
her minor children, and apply them to the support and education
of the family free from the control of the husband, or any person
claiming the same through him.

There are many other rules of law applicable to the relation of
husband and wife which, in occasional cases, bear hard upon the
one or the other, but your Committee do not deem it wise that a
new arrangement of our laws of domestic relations should be
attempted to obviate such cases; they always have and always will
arise out of every subject of legal regulation.

There is much of wisdom (which may well be applied to this and
many other subjects) in the quaint remark of an English lawyer,
philosopher, and statesman, that "it were well that men in their
innovations would follow the example of time, which innovateth
greatly but quietly, and by degrees scarcely to be perceived. It
is good also in states not to try experiments, except the
necessity be urgent and the utility evident; and well to beware
that it be the reformation that draweth on the change, and not
the desire of change that pretendeth the reformation."

In conclusion, your Committee recommend that the prayer of the
petitioners be denied; and they ask leave to introduce a
bill[127] corresponding with the suggestions hereinbefore
contained.

The report was signed by James L. Angle and all the members of the
Committee except Mr. Richards.