ion of one in Geneva)
permitting divorces by ordinary courts of law.

The age of consent means two things, or even three, which leads to
much confusion. It has a definite meaning in the criminal law, to be
discussed later; and then it has a double meaning in the marriage law.
First, the age under which the marriage of a girl or boy is absolutely
void; second, the age at which it is lawful without the consent of the
parents. The tendency of our legislation is to raise the latter age
and possibly the former. At least, marriages of very young persons may
be absolutely cancelled as if they had never taken place. According to
all precedents, human and divine, from the Garden of Eden to Romeo and
Juliet, "the age of consent" would by common sense appear to be the
age at which the woman did in fact consent; such is the common law,
but such is not usually law by our statutes.

But perhaps the legislation of the future is best represented by the
extraordinary effort, whose beginning we now see, to prevent
freedom of marriage Itself. There is probably no human liberty, no
constitutional right to property, or hardly, even, to one's personal
freedom, which has been more ardently asserted by all persons not
actually slaves (and even, indeed, by them) than the right to love and
marry. In the rare instances where even priests have interfered, it
has usually led to resentment or resistance. The common law has never
dared to.[1] Marriages between near relations, prohibited by the
Mosaic law, were invalid by the church law, and became invalid by
the secular law at the very late period when it began to have any
jurisdiction over the matter, hardly in England half a century ago; in
the United States, where we have never had canon law or church courts,
the secular law took the Mosaic law from the time of the Massachusetts
Body of Liberties (1641). The first interference of statute was
the prohibition of the marriage of first cousins. This seems to be
increasing. The prohibition of marriage between different races we
have mentioned in another chapter. To-day we witness the startling
tendency for the States to prescribe whom a person shall _not_ marry,
even if it do not prescribe whom they shall. The science of eugenics,
new-fangled as the word itself, will place upon the statute-book
matters and considerations which our forefathers left to the Lord.
Considerable progress has already been made in this country. The
marriage of insane persons