Punishment, no matter what its character, never is going to solve the problem of the unwed mother.
The world is full of Rosa Stobles. Nothing but sympathy and understanding and love and intelligent help will ease the weight of the crosses these Rosa Stobles bear.
Of course the crime at Red Bank was horrible, and nobody can excuse or even condone that mother who murdered her own daughter and let her grandchild die. But one must realize that what Christine Stoble did when she pulled the trigger was what uncounted women, rigid moralists, firm believers that drastic punishment should follow any violation of the code of morality, have it in their hearts to do.
Little 16-year-old Rosa Stoble had done wrong. But no 16-year-old can quite come under the classification of a hardened criminal deserving a death sentence.
Human punishment after all is usually such a stupid un-understanding, ineffectual sort of thing. It remedies so few situations. It solves so few problems. And it multiplies so many tragedies.
Little Rosa Stoble, like any other 16-year-old girl who is going to become an unwed mother, needed every bit of the love and sympathy and understanding that could have been given her. She needed it to the utmost.
I think that if Rosa's religious mother had been as swift and gentle to try to understand her daughter and to guide her before her relations with the baby's father as she was swift and ferocious after the baby was born to avenge what she thought was a disgrace upon her and her family, there would have been no tragedy. For there would have been no baby.
But that is asking a lot of uncounted thousands of mothers, apparently. Fathers, too. It is much easier to let things slide and then try to be an avenging god on your own account.
Once I believed that every unwed mother should keep her own child and rear it. Now I know I was wrong. I have seen so many of them utterly unfitted to rear their children, whether they are unwed or whether they are married by all the priests and pastors of the world. It is absolutely an individual problem every time it arises. And heaven knows that it arises often enough everywhere.
It is a curious thing about America -- when it comes to talk about sex we are probably as radical a nation as there is in the world. But when it comes to anything else, politics, economics, any possible change in the order of things as they are -- we are the world's most conservative nation.
Recently I went on a lecture tour and talked with mothers of boys and girls who are attending midwestern universities. I talked with officials of the universities. I learned that the younger generation seems to have a passion for talking about sex. [image: JANE ADDAMS]
But I also was told that there are not so very many girls who live as they argue.
The younger generation of today is the crowd that was around 10 years of age during the World War. That was a period when the whole world was swept by the cry, "Get what you can out of life today, for tomorrow you die."
We still are to some degree in the backwash of those days. The younger generation of today is growing up with the memories of those days in their minds and in their hearts.
The next generation will swing farther back into moral conservatism. It is a natural swing of the pendulum.
Judge Ben Lindsey is sincere in his "companionate marriage" idea. But he is wrong. That is not the remedy. It tears down. It makes rather a mess of what should be clean-cut and sharply defined. It tears down what women have been fighting for over uncounted generations -- legal responsibility for parenthood and some protection for the woman.
Always, I suppose, there will be unwed mothers. But up from the days of the cave we have been fighting our way toward monogamy. Humanity isn't going to throw that all away because some individuals of the race are going to violate the code.
Still, we should not hold the code by ruthless and brutal punishment; by mothers murdering their daughters who become unwed mothers.
Nothing but sympathy and love and understanding ever will keep that problem down to its minimum -- which, after all, is all we can hope to do.
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