IMMORALITY AND THE LAW

These objections are not of a purely abstract or theoretical character. They are based on the practical outcome of such enactments. Thus in the State of New York the "age of consent" was in former days thirteen years. It was advanced to fourteen and afterwards to sixteen. This is the extreme limit to which it may prudently be raised, and the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which had taken the chief part in obtaining these changes in the law, was content to stop at this point. But without seeking the approval of this Society, another body, the White Cross and Social Purity League, took the matter in hand, and succeeded in passing an amendment to the law which raised the age of consent to eighteen. What has been the result? The Committee of Fourteen, who are not witnesses hostile to moral legislation, state that "since the amendment went into effect making the age of consent eighteen years there have been few successful prosecutions. The laws are practically inoperative so far as the age clause is concerned." Juries naturally require clear evidence that a rape has been committed when the case concerns a grown-up girl in the full possession of her faculties, possibly even a clandestine prostitute. Moreover, as rape in the first degree involves the punishment of imprisonment for twenty years, there is a disinclination to convict a man unless the case is a very bad one. One judge, indeed, has asserted that he will not give any man the full penalty under the present law, so long as he is on the bench. The natural result of stretching the law to undue limits is to weaken it. Instead of being, as it should be, an extremely serious crime, rape loses in a large proportion of cases the opprobrium which rightly belongs to it. It is, therefore, a matter for regret that in some English dominions there is a tendency to raise the "age of consent" to an unduly high limit. In New South Wales the Girls' Protection Act has placed the age of consent at sixteen, and in the case of offences by guardians, schoolmasters, or employers at seventeen years, notwithstanding the vigorous opposition of a