arrangement with the authority, 70 such charges at Birmingham were consecutively brought before Lawson Tait.  These charges were all made under the Criminal Law Amendment Act.  In only 6 of these cases was he able to advise prosecution, in all of which cases conviction was obtained.  In 7 other cases in which the police decided to prosecute there was either no conviction or a very light sentence.  In at least 26 cases the charge was clearly trumped up.  The average age of these girls was 12.  “There is not a piece of sexual argot that ever had before reached my ears,” remarks Mr. Tait, “but was used by these children in the descriptions given by them of what had been done to them; and they introduced, in addition, quite a new vocabulary on the subject.  The minute and detailed descriptions of the sexual act given by chits of 10 and 11 would do credit to the pages of Mirabeau.  At first sight it is a puzzle to see how children so young obtained their information.”  “About the use of the word ‘seduced,’” the same writer remarks, “I wish to say that the class of women from amongst whom the great bulk of these cases are drawn seem to use it in a sense altogether different from that generally employed.  It is not with them a process in which male villainy succeeds by various arts in overcoming female virtue and reluctance, but simply a date at which an incident in their lives occurs for the first time; and, according to their use of the phrase, the ancient legend of the Sacred Scriptures, had it ended in the more ordinary and usual way by the virtue of Joseph yielding to the temptation offered, would have to read as a record of the seduction of Mrs. Potiphar.”

With reference to Lawson Tait’s observation that violent assaults on women, while they do occur, are very much rarer than the frequency with which such charges are made would lead us to believe, it may be remarked that many medico-legal authorities are of the same opinion. (See, e.g., G. Vivian Poore’s Treatise on Medical Jurisprudence, 1901, p. 325.  This writer also remarks:  “I hold very strongly that a woman may rape a man as much as a man may rape a woman.”) There can be little doubt that the plea of force is very frequently seized on by women as the easiest available weapon of defense when her connection with a man has been revealed.  She has been so permeated by the current notion that no “respectable” woman can possibly have any sexual impulses of her own to gratify that, in order to screen what she feels to be regarded as an utterly shameful and wicked, as well as foolish, act, she declares it never took place by her own will at all.  “Now, I ask you, gentlemen,” I once heard an experienced counsel address the jury in a criminal case, “as men of the world, have you ever known or heard of a woman, a single woman, confess that she had had sexual connection and not declare that force had been used to compel her to such connection?” The statement is a little sweeping, but in this