gs will be more speedily achieved and immediate good will
be accomplished by three reforms which may be begun at once--have begun,
in fact. In the first place, the "age of legal consent" should be
uniformly twenty-one. In most States to-day it is fourteen or
sixteen.[425] To the ordinary mind it is a self-evident proposition that
a girl of those ages, the slippery period of puberty, can but seldom
realise what she is doing when she submits herself to the lust of
scoundrels. But the minds of legislators pass understanding; and when, a
few years ago, a woman in the Legislature of Colorado proposed to have
the age of consent raised from sixteen to twenty-one, such a storm of
protest came from her male colleagues that the measure had to be
abandoned. In the second place the public should be made better
acquainted with the facts of prostitution. When people once realise
thoroughly what sickness and social ulcers result from the presence in
the city of New York of 100,000 debauched women (and the estimate is
conservative)--when they begin to reflect that their children must grow
up in such surroundings, then perhaps they will question the expediency
of the double standard of morality and will insist that what is wrong
for a woman is wrong for a man. It is a fact, to be borne carefully in
mind, that the vast majority of prostitutes begin their career below the
age of _eighteen_ and usually at the instigation of adult _men_, who
take advantage of their ignorance or of their poverty. If the miserable
Thaw trial did nothing else, it at least once more called public
attention to conditions which every intelligent man knows have existed
for years. Something can also be done by statute. New York has made
adultery a crime; and the State of Washington requires a physical
examination of the parties before marriage. In the third place,
physicians should take more pains to educate men to the knowledge that a
continent life is not a detriment to health--the contrary belief being
more widely spread than is usually suspected.

II. In the training of women, care should be taken to impress upon them
that they are not toys or spoiled children, but fellow-citizens, devoted
to the common task of advancing the ideals of the nation to their goal.

The woman's cause is man's; they rise or sink
Together, dwarf'd or godlike, bond or free:
If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How shall men grow?

TENNYSON, _The Princess_.