617 Sheet – American State Trials 1918 Volume X Leo Frank Document

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Reading Time: 3 minutes [369 words]

Here is the translated text as follows:

ALEXANDER WHISTELO, 585

Some prefer the darkness rather than the light, though we do not know why.

It is said that her evidence was meritorious and beneficial to the community, charitable, and advantageous to the Almshouse. I have never before heard of such pious and patriotic fornication.

If she was inclined to perjure herself, would she not have attributed the child to the richest father as well as to the fairest?

Perhaps not. Perhaps she wished to establish a partnership according to the custom of merchants, long used and approved within this city, to make one a sleeping partner, contributing through his friends, while the other is the active partner, taking on the trouble and responsibility, and giving his name to the firm. She has herself averred and proved this partnership, stated the locus in quo, and laid the venue in her bed. It is too late now for the counsel to claim it was a transitory action after the issue was found.

There is another legal perspective on this matter. The child may be considered a negotiable instrument under the Statute of Anne, with one party liable as the maker and the other as the endorser. Commerce is thus encroaching on common law every day. Formerly, a bastard was nullius filius and could have no father. Now, it seems he may have two, unless the Court deems that it is carrying the commercial principle too far. Then, if the Court will allow only one father to one child, it remains to be seen whether it will permit another innovation, no less violent, namely, that black men shall be the fathers of white children by intendment of law. If a white man can say to a black one, "Get out of that bed, you black devil, until I do this thing," by division of labor, trade will be advanced—you must do your part of the duty and I mine—I will get the child and you shall father it—there will be employment for us both in this manner. Can that, may it please your Honors, be the law?

As for a complaint made by the gentlemen that we insinuated the evidence on his side to be altogether base, if it...

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