evention 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 distinguished medical
member of the Legislative Council (the Hon. J.M. Creed), who presented
the arguments against so high an age. Not a single prosecution has so
far occurred under this Act.

In England the force of the moral legislation wave has been felt, but it
has been largely broken against the conservative traditions of the
country, which make all legislation, good or bad, very difficult. A
lengthy, elaborate and high-strung Prevention of Immorality Bill was
introduced in the House of Commons by a group of Nonconformists mainly
on the Liberal side. This Bill was very largely on the lines of the
Dutch law already mentioned; it proposed to raise the age of consent to
nineteen; makin