Annie Laurie
San Francisco Examiner/December 27, 1901
MRS. DALE has been acquitted of the murder of her little girl. The Jury has decided that the mother did not give the little girl strychnine pills with the intention of poisoning her.
The evidence showed that the little girl had begged her mother for the pills. She thought they were candy, and she would not believe her mother when she said they were poison. And so when her mother was asleep the child rose, walked over to the dressing table where the mother had left them within easy reach, ate them and died.
The Jury has set that mother free.
I wonder if her conscience will follow the jury’s example?
A woman who leaves deadly poison within reach of a baby may not be a murderer at heart, but she comes perilously near being one in reality.
I sat behind a woman and a little boy in the train the other day. The woman was evidently very tired. She leaned her head against the back of her seat and was half asleep.
The little boy was wide awake. He had a large clasp knife hung about his neck by a string, and he opened the knife and had fun jabbing at the air with the glittering blade.
Every time the train stopped or started the blade lunged fiercely. Once it came so near to the boy’s eyes that I feared to look, to see what it had done to him. At last I could stand it no longer. I leaned over and spoke to the woman.
“Pardon me, madam.” said I; “I don’t like to disturb you, but the little boy will hurt himself with that knife, I am afraid.”
The woman smiled amiably up at me.
“Oh, that is all right,” she said. :Johnny, shut the knife.”
In a minute or two Johnny had the knife open and mamma was half asleep again. I went into another car. I didn’t know what else to do. I could not take the knife away from the child.
Now, if that little boy jabs his eyes out with that knife, that woman will probably call on heaven to know why she is afflicted with such a sorrow.
I saw a woman give a nine-months-old baby a toasting fork to play with once, and she hated me ever after because I told her she was careless.
Last summer there was an epidemic of crime In Denver, Colo. Burglary, hold-ups, and finally murders.
The whole outbreak was traced to a gang of boys whose parents lived in the most fashionable part of the city. In the evidence it came out that not one of these boys’ mothers knew, or even pretended to try to know, where her boys were from dinner time to bed time. They were dreadfully disturbed when they found out.
A man who is making a wide streak in the atmosphere where he lives by his marvelous business enterprises is a broken-hearted and disappointed man because the wife he supports in luxury will not take the least trouble to manage or direct her children.
They are growing up to be a disgrace to their family and a sorrow to the mother who bore them, simply because she is too lazy and too self- indulgent to pay the proper attention to them.
A mother cannot do everything. There are some children who are beyond all control, but she can at least sit up and look interested when the child she has brought into the world is playing with a hungry and greedy knife. And she can take the very small and not overwearing trouble to put the bottle of poison beyond its foolish little fingers.
If she is too busy or too tired to do these things, she must be too busy and too tired to hear the name that the hard-hearted world will be apt to call her when the mischief Is done.
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