Where is the Man?

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 383, 10 September 1903, Page 5

Where is the Man?

THE DUNEDIN OHILD ABANDON- ■?./ MENT CASE, At We Dunedin Police Court on Friday the young woman Margaret Saunders, charged with unlawfully abandoning her infant child, pleaded guilty, and was committed to the Supreme Court for sentence. She was admitted to bail in her father's recognisance of £4O. The child, it will be remembered, was left on the doorstep of Mr Hugh Gourley's house in Clark street,"doubtless owing to the connection of the latter's father with the Benevolent Institution. The young woman is the daughter of respectable parents, from whom she had concealed her trouble. In her evidence she stated that she had been seduced by a married man (mentioning his name), who was in business in King Street, and who had left her in the lurch. Magistrate Graham said no good purpose would be served by the revelation of the man's name, and accordingly the press refrained from publishing, although the police inspector expressed bis regret that they could not place the seducer in the dock also. Writing on this aspect of the matter the Duhediin correspondent of the "Tuapeka Times" community is sick of-these stories from novels and cities, courts and newspapers, of women—always women—bearing the odium and sneer, the forked tongue and evil look, the actual legal punishment that our precious civilisation deals out to her, while the; man goes scot free. Well, the man isi known, and a precious specimen he api pears to be. He brought the " prisoner at the bar " to where she now is and then left hermit's the way of some brutes, though few of the four-legged species abandon their young so coldbloodedly. But the story is not done He did the same to another simple fool—at least she was a fool as sh< took risks, but not entirely so, for, it the second case, the fellow had t< marry her. Whether the second i any better off in getting what the firs lost I don't knOw ; probably not, bu " legally " she is. And, therefore, th case stands thus: An abandoned gu in the dock to answer a crimim charge for which the law may possibl; punish ber, and, on the other hand, respectable married man, a member c society, a person occupying such unique position that neither you, nor nor the law can touch himr All w can do, all we shall do, is to lift u our eyes and hands in holy horor, anc as we hide our outraged sense o most incontinently lecture th woman and publicly class her with th wicked and shameless. We may legally, even do worse.