ver profligate and wicked
the parents might justly be esteemed.

[Footnote a: Lord Raym. 68. Comb. 356.]

[Footnote b: _Nov._ 89. _c._ 15.]

THE method in which the English law provides maintenance for them is
as follows[c]. When a woman is delivered, or declares herself with
child, of a bastard, and will by oath before a justice of peace charge
any person having got her with child, the justice shall cause such
person to be apprehended, and commit him till he gives security,
either to maintain the child, or appear at the next quarter sessions
to dispute and try the fact. But if the woman dies, or is married
before delivery, or miscarries, or proves not to have been with child,
the person shall be discharged: otherwise the sessions, or two
justices out of sessions, upon original application to them, may take
order for the keeping of the bastard, by charging the mother, or the
reputed father with the payment of money or other sustentation for
that purpose. And if such putative father, or lewd mother, run away
from the parish, the overseers by direction of two justices may seize
their rents, goods, and chattels, in order to bring up the said
bastard child. Yet such is the humanity of our laws, that no woman can
be compulsively questioned concerning the father of her child, till
one month after her delivery: which indulgence is however very
frequently a hardship upon parishes, by suffering the parents to
escape.

[Footnote c: Stat. 18 Eliz. c. 3. 7 Jac. I. c. 4. 3 Car. I. c. 4. 13 &
14 Car. II. c. 12. 6 Geo. II. c. 31.]

3. I PROCEED next to the rights and incapacities which appertain to a
bastard. The rights are very few, being only such as he can _acquire_;
for he can _inherit_ nothing, being looked upon as the son of nobody,
and sometimes called _filius nullius_, sometimes _filius populi_[d].
Yet he may gain a sirname by reputation[e], though he has none by
inheritance. All other children have a settlement in their father's
parish; but a bastard in the parish where born, for he hath no
father[f]. However, in case of fraud, as if a woman be sent either by
order of justices, or comes to beg as a vagrant, to a parish which she
does not belong to, and drops her bastard there; the bastard shall, in
the first case, be settled in the parish from whence she was illegally
removed[g]; or, in the latter case, in the mother's own parish, if the
mother be apprehended for her vagrancy[h]. The incapacity of a bastard
consists pr