Inviolability of the Human Body.
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INVIOLABILITY OF THE HUMAN BODY.
By Irving Browne.
THE law is very punctilious about the sanctity of the human body, and will not tolerate any invasion of one man's body by another, against the will of its owner, except when directed by the ministers of public justice or the authorized custodians and trainers of the frame. In aid of this protection the law extends the arm of crim inal justice. There arc a few persons priv ileged to make an assault — the sheriff, the policeman, the father, the school teacher, the railway conductor, the janitor of a pub lic building, the master (of an apprentice), and most frequently of all, the slippered mother. In olden days it was commonly said, but never adjudged (except once in Mississippi), that a husband could lawfully chastise his wife; but we have changed all that, and now it is held that he may not, even if she is drunken and saucy and keeps forbidden company. Com. r. McAfee, 108 Mass. 458; II Am. Rep. 383. And even Mississippi has come into line, Harris v. State, 71 Miss. 462, and repudiates this "revolting precedent." One pagan court has decided that a parent is not punishable for excessive chastisement of his child, un less malicious and permanently injurious or disfiguring. State v. Jones, 95 N. C. 583; 59 Am. Rep. 282, and another absurd court decides that a pedagogue may chastise a pupil for fighting away from school and out of school hours. Hutton i>. State, 23 Tex. Ct. App. 386; 59 Am. Rep. 776; and so where the offense was profanity on the way home. Deskins v. Gore, 85 Mo. 485; 55 Am. Rep. 387. I doubt the propriety of lengthening the arm of the pedagogue to this extent, or of investing him with the parental power of correction in matters of manners disconnected from the school.
This anxious legal care of the human body begins at a very early period — as soon as it is conceived — and protects the child in its mother's womb against the de structive inclinations of others, even of its own parents. But the law does not go so far in its protection in matters of mere civil contract. Therefore it has been adjudged that a railroad company is not answerable for the death, through its negligence, of an unborn infant present on its train in the per son of its passenger mother. Walker r. Gt. North. R. Co., 28 L. R. Irish, 69; 32 Cent. L- J-, 197. The child, however, when born, may maintain an action of damages for the death of his mother caused by negligence. The George and Richard, L. R. 3 Adm. 465. The same is held of a child whose father is killed by intoxication caused by another, although born after the father's death. Quinlan v. Welch, 141 X. Y. 158. These results come through the medium of Lord Campbell's Act and the Civil Damage Acts. Though father and mother forsake the child when born, yet humane societies will take it up, and protect its budding frame from the greed of theatrical exploiters of infant prod igies, and circus exhibitors of child acro bats, and the legislature will intervene to prevent avaricious employers from stunting its growth by long or late hours. So careful is the law of the human body that it regards the slightest intentional an gry or unlawful touching of it as constitu ting an assault and battery, punishable criminally. The ancient books lay it down that to throw water on the clothes, or spit on the person, or throw a firecracker at, or set a dog on, or cut off one's hair, or strip off one's clothing, constitutes a criminal of fense, although no injury is done to the
