Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statuteStimson, Frederic Jesup
History
Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statute
Stimson, Frederic Jesup
Legislation -- United States
Perhaps a word should be given to other laws relating to minors as
well as to young women. There is very general legislation throughout
the country forbidding the sale of intoxicating liquor to persons
under twenty-one, and in the great majority of the States the sale
of cigarettes, narcotics or other drugs, or even tobacco, to persons
under twenty-one, eighteen, or fifteen, respectively. In some States
it is forbidden, or made a misdemeanor, to insure the lives of
children--very important legislation, if necessary. In 1904 Virginia
passed a statute punishing kidnapping with death, which is followed in
1905 by heavy penalties for abduction in three other States; fourteen
States establish juvenile courts. Seven States make voluntary
cohabitation a crime, and six pass what are known as curfew laws.
Indeed, it may be generally said that the tendency is, either by State
statute or municipal ordinance, to forbid children, or at least girls
under sixteen, from being unattended on the streets of a city after a
certain hour in the evening.
In 1907 Mississippi makes the age of consent twelve, and the penalty
for rape death, which, indeed, is the common law, but which law has
extraordinary consequences when the age is raised, as it is in many
States, to eighteen. Two more States adopt the laws against abduction
and one a statute against blackmail.
Sufficient has, perhaps, been said to give the reader a general view
of contemporary law-making on this most important matter of personal
relations. Most of the matters mentioned in this chapter are cohered
by various learned societies in annual reports, or even by the
government, in cases of marriage and divorce, and to such special
treatises the reader may be referred for more precise information. The
Special Report of the United States Census Office, 1909, published
early in 1910, makes a careful and elaborate study of the whole
question from the years 1867 to 1906. Such statistics are necessarily
uncertain for reasons already indicated. Court judgments do not
indicate the true cause of divorce, nor is the complainant necessarily
the innocent party, nor are the numbers of divorces granted, as for
instance in Nevada, any fair indication of the normal divorce rate of
the people really living in that State. With this caution we will note
that the number of divorces varied from about five hundred in each
hundred thousand of married population every year in Washington,
Montana, Colorado, Arkansas, Texas, Oregon, Wyoming, Indiana, Idaho,
and Oklahoma, down to less than fifty, or about one-tenth as many, in
New Jersey, New York, and Delaware. Certain significant observations
may certainly be made upon this table. In the first place, the
older States, the old thirteen, have, from the point of view of the
conservative or divorce reformer, the best record. At the head
stand the three States just named, then North Carolina, Georgia,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Massachusetts, Louisiana (largely
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