Page:The case for women's suffrage.djvu/149

 Suppression; Affiliation Act; Legitimation of Children; Married Women’s Property Act; Workmen’s Wages; Children’s Protection; Early Closing; Factories Amendments; State Children’s Amendment; Workmen’s Compensation; Children’s Protection re Smoking; Opium Amendment; Police Prisons, &c.

Immediately the women of South Australia were enfranchised the age to protect girls was raised from fourteen to sixteen years, and since, I think, has been raised to eighteen. I was very much impressed by the remarks made by Mr. Horace Smith, the magistrate who was on the Bench when seventy-five women were brought before him for attempting to go to the House of Commons to present a petition praying the Government to bring in a Bill for Votes for Women under the same terms as now do, or may, in future apply to men.

There was one over sixteen but not seventeen years old, a young girl who had been working in the factory over two years and who came from Huddersfield representing her mother, who took her to Manchester to place her in the care of one of the leaders of the W.S.P.U. to bring to London for the purpose of attending the Conference and to help carry the resolution of that Conference into effect. Mr. Smith said she was a child and should be in the schoolroom; she was too young to know or understand what she was doing. Yet the law of this land—the man-made law—says in effect that a girl of sixteen and a day is quite old enough to decide on what is right or wrong as to acts of morality. A