and Marcus Aurelius founded associations for
destitute girls. Alexander Severus established one also for poor
children. These form the only organized efforts made for this object,
during many centuries, by the most civilized and refined state of
antiquity.

The number, however, of these wretched creatures, increased beyond all
cure from scattered exceptional efforts like these. Everywhere the poor
got rid of their children by exposure, or sold them as slaves. The rich,
if indifferent to their offspring, or unwilling to take the trouble of
rearing them, sent them out to the public square, where pimps, beggars,
witches, and slave-dealers gleaned their horrible harvest. At length,
under the influence of Christianity, legislation began to take
cognizance of the practice.

The Emperor Constantine, the Emperor Valentian, Valens, and Gratian,
sixty years later, continued this humane legislation.

They ordered, under strict penalties, that every one should nourish his
own children, and forbade exposition; declaring also that no one had the
right to reclaim the children he had abandoned; the motive to this law
being the desire to make it for the interest of those "taking up"
exposed children to keep them, even if necessary, as slaves, against any
outside claims.

Unfortunately, at that period, slavery was held a less evil than the
ordinary fate to which the poor left their children.

The punishment of death was also decreed against Infanticide.

It is an interesting fact that a portion, and probably the whole, of our
ancestral tribes looked with the greatest horror on abortion and
infanticide. The laws of the Visigoths punished these offenses with
death or blindness. Their influence, of course, should always be
considered, as well as that of Christianity, in estimating the modern
position of woman and the outcast child, as compared with their status
under Greek and Roman civilization.

At a later period (412 A. D.) the imperial legislation again endeavored
to prevent the reclaiming of exposed children from compassionate persons
who had taken them. "Were they right to say that those children belonged
to them when they had despised them even to the point of abandoning them
to death?"

It was provided also, that in future no one should "take from the
ground" exposed children except in the presence of witnesses, and that
the archbishop should put his signature on the document of guardianship
which was prepared. (Cod. Theo