By the law of Massachusetts towns of more than 2,000 inhabitants may choose a separate registrar to record and license, but not to celebrate, marriages: see chap, xvi, sec. i, _c_).
Aside from its public features, just considered, the future matrimonial code of the United States will have to remedy numerous defects in the substance of the law. These may be seen by reference to the detailed examination elsewhere presented. In particular, it will be necessary to get rid of the appalling chaos of state regulations regarding void and voidable contracts. The absurd conflicts touching the forbidden degrees of relationship are a positive social menace. The most serious complications may arise. For instance, a man and a woman who may be legally wed in the place where they dwell might, should they move a mile across the state line and then marry, be guilty of incestuous union and their children become bastards. Surely it ought to be possible for an enlightened people to agree upon a common rule in a matter of such vital concern.[676]
[676] _Cf._ RICHBERG, _Incongruity of the Divorce Laws_, 65 ff.
In many of the states the laws governing the "age of consent"--that is, the age below which a person may not legally consent to carnal union[677]--are still very defective, although distinct progress has been made since 1885. In that year Mr. W. T. Stead's exposure of the frightful traffic in young girls then tolerated in London aroused the social conscience on both sides of the sea. The "old common law period of ten, sometimes twelve, years" was then "the basis of the age of consent legislation of most of the states, and also of the law of congress pertaining to rape in the District of Columbia and other territory under the immediate jurisdiction of the national government.... It was not until after the astounding revelations made by Mr. Stead ... that the age of consent laws in the United States began to attract attention.... Even then the age of consent in England was thirteen years. One outcome of Mr. Stead's shocking exposures was the speedy raising of the age by the British parliament from thirteen to sixteen years, Mr. Gladstone and others advocating eighteen." The New York Committee for the Prevention of State Regulation of Vice was already engaged in its long struggle to "thwart the periodical efforts[678] made to introduce in New York and other American cities the odious old-world system of licensed and state-regulated vice; but its members were quite unaware, until Mr. Stead's startling London revelations suggested the inquiry here, that, by the age of consent laws of New York and of most of the states, young girls of ten years were made legally capable of consenting to their own ruin, and that at that time in one state, Delaware, the age was at the shockingly low period of seven years! Bad as English law had been shown to be in its inadequate protection of girlhood our own legal position ... was found to be still worse. The New York committee, as soon as the facts were known, inaugurated a campaign of petitions to sundry state legislatures and to the congress of the United States, asking that the age be raised to at least eighteen years, and the work was also entered into earnestly and effectively by the Woman's Christian Temperance Unions and the White Cross societies."[679] Under the leadership of Helen H. Gardener, Frances E. Willard, and others, the women of the country conducted a veritable "crusade" of education against the existing state laws, which for zeal, ability, and effective method may well serve as a model for future united efforts in favor of social reforms. It was pointed out as a notorious fact "that brothels and vice-factories get their recruits from the ranks of childhood--from the ignorance which is unprotected by the law;" that "children's lives are thus wrecked, and the state is burdened with disease and vice and crime and insanity, which is transmitted and retransmitted until its proportions appall those who understand;" and that it is absurd to make the legal age for consent to a valid marriage higher than that for consent to prostitution.