Page:Women Wanted.djvu/414

 new law significantly omits all objectionable reference: it is a "Law Concerning Children whose Parents have not Married Each Other." They are equally entitled to a father's name and support and to an inheritance in his property as are any other kind of children. The father must be found! Not even if the paternity is a matter of doubt among three men or six men or any several men, can any of them, or all of them, escape behind "exceptio plurium," which in other lands affords them protection. In Norway, they are every one of them a party to the possible obligation. And the financial responsibility of fathering the child in question is distributed pro rata among them. What the Norwegian law accomplishes, you see, is the abolition of anonymous paternity.

Like this, there is a great deal in the laws and the religion and the public opinion of the world of yesterday that will need revision. Lastly, there is that which is of more significance than all the rest. Way back in the beginning of things, the lady who was called Eve, you remember as the Sunday school lesson ran, got the world into a lot of trouble, it was said, by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Too little knowledge, some one else has told us, may prove a dangerous thing. But there is a Latin proverb on which a school of therapeutics is founded, "Similia similibus curantur." Then, if "like cures like," what we need to-day is more knowledge to make right the ancient wrong that afflicts the earth! Well, we have it.