This matter of the sexual precocity of girls has an important bearing on the question of the “age of consent,” or the age at which it should be legal for a girl to consent to sexual intercourse.  Until within the last twenty-five years there has been a tendency to set a very low age (even as low as ten) as the age above which a man commits no offence in having sexual intercourse with a girl.  In recent years there has been a tendency to run to the opposite and equally unfortunate extreme of raising it to a very late age.  In England, by the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, the age of consent was raised to sixteen (this clause of the bill being carried in the House of Commons by a majority of 108).  This seems to be the reasonable age at which the limit should be set and its extreme high limit in temperate climates.  It is the age recognized by the Italian Criminal Code, and in many other parts of the civilized world.  Gladstone, however, was in favor of raising it to eighteen, and Howard, in discussing this question as regards the United States (Matrimonial Institutions, vol. iii, pp. 195-203), thinks it ought everywhere to be raised to twenty-one, so coinciding with the age of legal majority at which a woman can enter into business or political relations.  There has been, during recent years, a wide limit of variation in the legislation of the different American States on this point, the differences of the two limits being as much as eight years, and in some important States the act of intercourse with a girl under eighteen is declared to be “rape,” and punishable with imprisonment for life.

Such enactments as these, however, it must be recognized, are arbitrary, artificial, and unnatural.  They do not rest on a sound biological basis, and cannot be enforced by the common sense of the community.  There is no proper analogy between the age of legal majority which is fixed, approximately, with reference to the ability to comprehend abstract matters of intelligence, and the age of sexual maturity which occurs much earlier, both physically and psychically, and is determined in women by a very precise biological event:  the completion of puberty in the onset of menstruation.  Among peoples living under natural conditions in all parts of the world it is recognized that a girl becomes sexually a woman at puberty; at that epoch she receives her initiation into adult life and becomes a wife and a mother.  To declare that the act of intercourse with a woman who, by the natural instinct of mankind generally, is regarded as old enough for all the duties of womanhood, is a criminal act of rape, punishable by imprisonment for life, can only be considered an abuse of language, and, what is worse, an abuse of law, even if we leave all psychological and moral considerations out of the question, for it deprives the conception of rape of all that renders it naturally and properly revolting.

The sound view in this question is clearly