[Liberty, March 10, 1888.]

With a plentiful sprinkling of full-face Gothic exclamation points and a series of hysterical shrieks, the Journal of United Labor, organ of pious Powderly and pure Litchman, rushes upon Liberty with the inquiry whether Anarchy asks liberty to ruin little girls. Liberty is thus questioned simply because it characterized those who petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for a further raise of the age of consent to sixteen as a bevy of impertinent and prudish women. The answer shall be direct and explicit. Anarchy does not ask liberty to ruin little girls, but it does ask liberty of sexual association with girls already several years past the age of womanhood, equipped by nature with the capacity of maternity, and even acknowledged by the law to be competent to marry and begin the rearing of a family. To hold a man whose association with such a girl has been sanctioned by her free consent and even her ardent desire guilty of the crime of rape and to subject him to life imprisonment is an outrage to which a whole font of exclamation points would do scant justice. If there are any mothers, as the Journal of United Labor pretends, who look upon such an outrage as a protection against outrage, they confess thereby not only their callous disregard of human rights, but the imbecility of their daughters and their own responsibility for the training that has allowed them to grow up in imbecility. Has Liberty a daughter? further inquires the Journal of United Labor. Why, certainly; Order is Liberty’s daughter, acknowledged as such from the first. Liberty is not the daughter, but the mother, of Order. But it is needless to raise the age of consent on account of Liberty’s daughter. Order fears no seducer. When all daughters have such mothers and all mothers such daughters, the Journal of United Labor may continue to regard them as the worst of womankind, but the powers of the seducer will be gone, no matter what may be fixed as the age of consent. Because Liberty holds this opinion and expresses it, Powderly and Litchman profess to consider her a disgrace to the press of America. Really they do not so look upon her, but they are very anxious to win popular approval by pandering to popular prejudices, and so they took advantage of the opportunity which Liberty’s words gave them to pose as champions of outraged virtue while endeavoring to identify Anarchism with wholesale rape of the innocents.(45 ¶ 1)