outrage among the respectable middle-classes, leading to pressure for the age of consent to be raised again. The investigative journalist William Thomas Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette was pivotal in exposing the problem of child prostitution in the London underworld through a publicity stunt. In 1885 he "purchased" one victim, Eliza Armstrong, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a chimney sweep, for five pounds and took her to a brothel where she was drugged. He then published a series of four exposés entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, which shocked its readers with tales of child prostitution and the abduction, procurement, and sale of young English virgins to Continental "pleasure palaces". The "Maiden Tribute" was an instant sensation with the reading public, and Victorian society was thrown into an uproar about prostitution. Fearing riots on a national scale, the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, pleaded in vain with Stead to cease publication of the articles. A wide variety of reform groups held protest meetings and marched together to Hyde Park demanding that the age of consent be raised. The government was forced to propose the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen and clamped down on prostitution. In the United States, as late as the 1880s most states set the minimum age at ten to twelve (in Delaware, it was seven in 1895). Inspired by the "Maiden Tribute" articles, female reformers in the U.S. initiated their own campaign, which petitioned legislators to raise the legal minimum age to at least sixteen, with the ultimate goal to raise the age to eighteen. The campaign was successful, with almost all states raising the minimum age to sixteen to eighteen years by 1920. In France, Portugal, Denmark, the Swiss cantons and other countries, the minimum age was raised to between thirteen and sixteen years in the following decades. Though the original arguments for raising the age of consent were based on morality, since then the raison d'être of the laws has changed to child welfare and a so-called right to childhood or innocence. In France, under the Napoleonic Code, the age of consent was set in 1832 at eleven, and was raised to thirteen in 1863. It was increased to fifteen in 1945. In the 1970s, a group of prominent French intellectuals advocated for the repeal of the age of consent laws, but did not