lf from
false accusations.

It is very generally assumed that sexual offences against children are
increasing in number. As regards the increase in Germany, the following
figures are given by Mittelmaier.[121] For sexual offences against
children, the convictions in the year 1897 numbered 3085; and in the
year 1904, 4378. But of hardly any offences specified in the code can we
say with more certainty than we can of sexual offences against children,
that the convictions bear no necessary relationship to the number of
offences actually committed. My own experience in the law courts leads
me to see in the figures nothing more than an increase in the number of
_convictions_ for such offences--convictions which may have involved the
innocent as well as the guilty. However this may be, historical studies
prove that sexual offences against children are no new thing. Long ago,
Martial, in the sixth and eighth epigrams of his ninth book, complained
of the procurement of children, referring to boys rather than to girls.
Otto Stoll[122] reports cases from uncivilised countries; and to his
account of the defloration of children he appends the following words:
"From all such details, we draw the ethnologically remarkable inference,
that those human beings who have attained the highest level of
civilisation, relapse frequently in the matter of the sexual life to the
rudest instincts of savagery; and that in this respect neither does one
civilised country much excel another, nor is 'civilised man' in a
position to cast many reproaches in the teeth of the savage." Finally, I
may refer to the experience of a Parisian Police Commissary,[123] who in
the middle of the nineteenth century described prostitution in Paris,
and devoted a special chapter to the subject of child-prostitution.
Beyond question, the committing of sexual offences against children is
no peculiar privilege of the civilised world or of modern times;
although it remains possible that there has of late been some increase
in the number of such offences.

It is obviously right that children should receive special protection
from the law. The higher limit of the age of protection varies from ten
to eighteen years. Ten years is the age-limit in certain States of the
American Union; seventeen is the age-limit in Finland.[124] According to
Mittelmaier, two considerations should guide us in regard to the
protection of children: bodily immaturity, and moral weakness. The
existe