Page:Wrong and Right Methods of Dealing with Social Evil - Elizabeth Blackwell (1883).djvu/77

Rh parental function from early abuse and ruinous exercise. This moral incapacity, to judge of the results of their own actions in relation to sexual intercourse, is not only true of ignorant little girls of thirteen and fourteen, who sell themselves for the offer of a few shillings or a pretty dress, but such moral incapacity belongs to all youth. From the age of sixteen to eighteen, thoughtless ignorance, or the blind impulse of physical sex, are generally stronger than the intellectual and moral faculties. Youth at that age are quite unable to weigh or comprehend the very grave and powerful reasons which make early debauchery so destructive to a nation. At that age they have not acquired habits of sexual self-control, unless they have been surrounded early by exceptionally wise human influences. Our youth, until the age of eighteen, most imperatively require the guardianship and help of law and custom. It is the most cruel injury that we can do to childhood and youth to allow the vicious adult to trade upon impulsive inexperience; or to suffer corrupt age to plead that ignorant youth tempted it to evil. The physiological plea, urged in opposition to the protection of the young girl, is false, for the physical woman is a moral child, in the great mass of minor girls.

The second argument, viz., that fornicators must be protected from fraud, is equally false. Law is made for the protection of human beings in right-doing, not