on. Thus we find
that a year's imprisonment, or a heavy fine, threatens any one who
exposes any object or writing which "offends decency," a provision which
enabled a policeman to enter an art-pottery shop in Amsterdam and remove
a piece of porcelain on which he detected an insufficiently clothed
human figure. Yet this paragraph of the law had been passed with
scarcely any opposition. Another provision of this law deals extensively
with the difficult and complicated question of the "age of consent" for
girls, which it raises to the age of twenty-one, making intercourse with
a girl under twenty-one an offence punishable by four years'
imprisonment. It is generally regarded as desirable that chastity should
be preserved until adult age is well established. But as soon as sexual
maturity is attained--which is long before what we conventionally regard
as the adult age, and earlier in girls than in boys--it is impossible to
dismiss the question of personal responsibility. A girl over sixteen,
and still more when she is over twenty, is a developed human being on
the sexual side; she is capable of seducing as well as of being seduced;
she is often more mature than the youth of corresponding age; to
instruct her in sexual hygiene, to train her to responsibility, is the
proper task of morals. But to treat her as an irresponsible child, and
to regard the act of interfering with her chastity when her consent has
been given, as on a level with an assault on an innocent child merely
introduces confusion. It must often be unjust to the male partner in the
act; it is always demoralizing and degrading to the girl whom it aims at
"protecting"; above all, it reduces what ought to be an extremely
serious crime to the level of a merely nominal offence when it punishes
one of two practically mature persons for engaging with full knowledge
and deliberation in an act which, however undesirable, is altogether
according to Nature. There is here a fatal confusion between a crime and
an action which is at the worst morally reprehensible and only properly
combated by moral methods.

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 Pr