principle proceed all the
duties of children to their parents, which are enjoined by positive
laws. And the Athenian laws[f] carried this principle into practice
with a scrupulous kind of nicety: obliging all children to provide for
their father, when fallen into poverty; with an exception to spurious
children, to those whose chastity had been prostituted by consent of
the father, and to those whom he had not put in any way of gaining a
livelyhood. The legislature, says baron Montesquieu[g], considered,
that in the first case the father, being uncertain, had rendered the
natural obligation precarious; that, in the second case, he had
sullied the life he had given, and done his children the greatest of
injuries, in depriving them of their reputation; and that, in the
third case, he had rendered their life (so far as in him lay) an
insupportable burthen, by furnishing them with no means of
subsistence.

[Footnote f: Potter's Antiq. b. 4. c. 15.]

[Footnote g: Sp. L. l. 26. c. 5.]

OUR laws agree with those of Athens with regard to the first only of
these particulars, the case of spurious issue. In the other cases the
law does not hold the tie of nature to be dissolved by any
misbehaviour of the parent; and therefore a child is equally
justifiable in defending the person, or maintaining the cause or suit,
of a bad parent, as a good one; and is equally compellable[h], if of
sufficient ability, to maintain and provide for a wicked and unnatural
progenitor, as for one who has shewn the greatest tenderness and
parental piety.

[Footnote h: Stat. 43 Eliz. c. 2.]

II. WE are next to consider the case of illegitimate children, or
bastards; with regard to whom let us inquire, 1. Who are bastards. 2.
The legal duties of the parents towards a bastard child. 3. The rights
and incapacities attending such bastard children.

1. WHO are bastards. A bastard, by our English laws, is one that is
not only begotten, but born, out of lawful matrimony. The civil and
canon laws do not allow a child to remain a bastard, if the parents
afterwards intermarry[i]: and herein they differ most materially from
our law; which, though not so strict as to require that the child
shall be _begotten_, yet makes it an indispensable condition that it
shall be _born_, after lawful wedlock. And the reason of our English
law is surely much superior to that of the Roman, if we consider the
principal end and design of establishing the contract of marriage,