If, for instance, you have a thoroughly rascally couple making a
living by infamous means and bringing up their children to their
trade, the king's proctor, instead of pursuing his present purely
mischievous function of preventing couples from being divorced
by proving that they both desire it, might very well intervene and
divorce these children from their parents. At present, if the
Queen herself were to rescue some unfortunate child from
degradation and misery and place her in a respectable home, and
some unmentionable pair of blackguards claimed the child and
proved that they were its father and mother, the child would be
given to them in the name of the sanctity of the home and the
holiness of parentage, after perpetrating which crime the law
would calmly send an education officer to take the child out of
the parents' hands several hours a day in the still more sacred
name of compulsory education. (Of course what would really happen
would be that the couple would blackmail the Queen for their
consent to the salvation of the child, unless, indeed, a hint from
a police inspector convinced them that bad characters cannot
always rely on pedantically constitutional treatment when they
come into conflict with persons in high station).
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