ject to parental authority until he is twenty-one) that he is no longer granted the protection of the juvenile courts, but must be held accountable for his acts before the ordinary courts and must expect the same justice and the same penalties as an adult. It is precisely at eighteen, therefore, that he becomes the recipient of the formidable honor of being subject to the guillotine.

Why should there be this time-lag between the criminal majority and the civil majority? Is it, explains one commentator, because "the faculty of distinguishing and resisting evil is acquired at an earlier age than is the capacity for controlling one's business affairs." In making this justification do our jurists not then admit that a boy of eighteen is capable of recognizing and resisting evil? If, then, he commits a homosexual act at that age why should we not assume that he does so with full knowledge of what he does?

Moreover, the criminal majority, according to the ordinance of February 2, 1945, may, in the court's discretion, be lowered from eighteen to sixteen, some young men (so-called bad actors) being presumed to be responsible for their acts from a very early age. But for a homosexual offense the law -if not the judge who still has, of course, the potentiality of being more indulgent-refuses to permit of the slightest elasticity, the slightest concession: twenty-one it is and not one day less.

To go even further, so far as the specific offense-apart from a homosexual act of rape or of contributing to the delinquency of a minor is concerned, the law stipulates that if the act is committed without fraud or violence, it is punishable as such only if the minor is less than eighteen, and, the commentators explain, that over eighteen "a minor's consent is no longer nullified by any lack of discern-

ment.

And yet, so far as the simple homo-

sexual act is concerned, a young man is considered as acting without discernment until he is twenty-one and under this provision his partner is subject to a maximum of three years in prison. One may be justified in asking whether this neo-puritanism is not more concerned with the persecution of the homosexual than it is with the "protection of a minor."

Let us now consider how this retrograde legislation has been applied. I have taken a number of statistics from the "General Report of the Administration of Criminal Justice," published each year by the Minister of Justice. In compiling these statistics I have considered only the simple offense of committing a homosexual act and have excluded any aggravated offenses, which may be even more severely

punished, such as:

1. Acts committed, even without violence, with minors of less than fifteen years of age.

2. Acts said to be an outrage of public decency punished in recent years with extreme severity.

3. Homosexual acts accompanied by force or violence.

4. Abduction or seduction of a minor.

5. Contributing to the delinquency

of a minor.

Even within the scope of this voluntarily restricted investigation the results are sufficiently eloquent.

Let us examine first the accused by occupation. For the years 1953, 1954, 1955, of 836 accused homosexuals, 511 were mechanics, clerks, or laborers, a little more than sixty-one percent of the total. Manual laborers alone accounted for forty-two percent! These figures show:

1. That, contrary to a wide-spread but erroneous idea, notably in leftist circles, and shared by Lenin, homosexuality is not the exclusive prerogative of the upper classes, and that Wolfenden was right in concluding that it exists in all levels of society.

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