ey are executed. I
have had letters, too agonizing to print, expressing the sufferings of
mothers under laws like these. There lies before me a letter,--not from
Rhode Island,--written by a widowed mother who suffers daily tortures, even
while in possession of her child, at the knowledge that it is not legally
hers, but held only by the temporary permission of the guardian appointed
under her husband's will.

"I beg you," she says, "to take this will to the hilltop, and urge
law-makers in our next legislature to free the State record from the
shameful story that no mother can control her child unless it is born out
of wedlock."

"From the moment," she says, "when the will was read to me, I have made no
effort to set it aside. I wait till God reveals his plans, so far as my own
condition is concerned. But out of my keen comprehension of this great
wrong, notwithstanding my submission for myself, my whole soul is
stirred,--for my child, who is a little woman; for all women, that the laws
may be changed which subject a true woman, a devoted wife, a faithful
mother, to such mental agonies as I have endured, and shall endure till I
die."

In a later letter she says, "I now have his [the guardian's] solemn promise
that he will not remove her from my control. To some extent my sufferings
are allayed; and yet never, till she arrives at the age of twenty-one,
shall I fully trust." I wish that mothers who dwell in sheltered and happy
homes would try to bring to their minds the condition of a mother whose
possession of her only child rests upon the "promise" of a comparative
stranger. We should get beyond the meaningless cry, "I have all the rights
I want," if mothers could only remember that among these rights, in most
States of the Union, the right of a widowed mother to her child is not
included.

By strenuous effort, the law on this point has in Massachusetts been
gradually amended, till it now stands thus: The father is authorized to
appoint a guardian by will; but the powers of this guardian do not entitle
him to take the child from the mother.

"The guardian of a minor ... shall have the custody and tuition of
his ward; and the care and management of all his estate, except that
the father of the minor, if living, and in case of his death the
mother, they being respectively competent to transact their own
business, shall be entitled to the custody of the person of the
minor and the care of his e