Curious Trial in France

Feilding Star, Volume X, Issue 122, 20 April 1889, Page 2

Curious Trial in France

A whole batch of persons who wero accused of illegally practising midwifery were tried at Louviera, in Norman by, last January. The principal defendant was a man named Martin, a watchmaker, whose doings were denounced to the police by a fatal laborer who had seduced the daughter of his master, and had expectations of marrying the girl. Martin and his colleagues had made a considerable amount of money, as many of the peasant farmers in the district took their wives to them from time to time. Thiß wholesale practice of the precepts of Malthus, says the Paris correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, is growing as common in rural Franco as it is in the towns, and it is attributed to the fact that since the peasants have become proprietors instead of meteyers, or simple farmers, they are apprehensive of the burdens of large families, as well as of the eventual division of their property among: a too numerous progeny. This was — amply demonstrated during Martin's trial, when the rustic husbands •pokef' in the most . matter-of-fact manner of the services of the " herbalist" and his congeners. Martin was- condemned to eight years' cellular imprisonment, while some of his accomplices received minor sentences according to their degree* of culpability .