JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

LONDON 1896

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

Chapter Page

List of Books consultedvii.

Introduction1

I.Christian Opinion from the Age of Justinian5

II.Vulgar Errors9

III.Literature: Pornographic and Descriptive: Carlier, Les deux Prostitutions16

IV.Literature: Medico-Forensic: Tardieu21

V.Literature: Medico-Psychological: Moreau, Tarnowsky, Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso29

VI.Literature: Historical and Anthropological: Meier, "A Problem in Greek Ethics"; Rosenbaum, Bastian, Herbert Spencer, Sir Richard Burton, Mantegazza75

VII.Literature: Polemical: Karl Heinrich Ulrichs84

VIII.Literature: Idealistic: Walt Whitman115

IX.Epilogue126

X.Suggestions upon Legislation131

Footnotes

BOOKS CONSULTED.

Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Chapter XLIV.

F. Carlier. Les deux Prostitutions. Paris, Dentu, 1889.

A. Tardieu. Attentats aux Moeurs. Paris, Billière, 1878.

J. L. Casper and Carl Liman. Handbuch der Gerichtlichen Medicin. Berlin, Hirschwald, 1889.

J. L. Casper. Klinische Novellen. Berlin, Hirschwald, 1863.

P. Morrau. Des Aberrations du Sens Génétique. Paris, Asselin et Houzeau, 1887.

B. Tarnowsky. Die krankhaften Erscheinungen des Geschlechtssinnes. Berlin, Hirschwald, 1886.

Levy-München. Die Männliche Sterilität. Berlin, Henser, 1889.

R. von Krafft-Ebing. Psychopathia Sexualis. Stuttgart, Enke, 1889.

Cesare Lombroso. Der Verbrecher in Anthropologischer, Aerztlicher und Juristischer Beziehung. Hamburg, Richter, 1887.

M. H. F. Meier. Pæderastie. Ersch und Gruber's Allgemeine Encyclopädie. Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1837.

A Problem in Greek Ethics. No name or date. "Ten Copies printed for the Author's Use."

J. Rosenbaum. Geschichte der Lustseuche im Alterthume. Halle a. S., H. W. Schmidt, 1882.

Bastian. Der Mensch in der Geschichte. Leipzig, Wigand, 1860.

Herbert Spencer. Sociological Tables.

P. Dufour. Histoire de la Prostitution. Eight vols. Bruxelles, Rozey, 1861.

Sir R. F. Burton. Arabian Nights. Vol. 10. Benares, 1885.

P. Mantegazza. Gli Amori degli Uomini. Milano, 1886.

Numa Numantius (K. H. Ulrichs). Inclusa. Anthropologische Studien über mannmännliche Geschlechtsliebe. Leipzig, 1864.

Numa Numantius. Formatrix. Anthrop. Studien über urnische Liebe. Leipzig, 1865.

Numa Numantius. Vindex. Social-juristische Studien über mannmännliche Geschlechtsliebe. Leipzig, 1864.

Numa Numantius. Vindicta. Kampf für Freiheit u.s.w. Leipzig, 1865.

Numa Numantius. Ara Spei. Moralphil. und Socialphil. Studien über urnische Liebe. Leipzig, 1865.

K. H. Ulrichs. Gladius Furens. Das Naturräthsel der Urningsliebe. Kassel, Württenberger, 1868.

K. H. Ulrichs. Memnon. Die Geschlechtsnatur des mannliebenden Urnings. Schleiz, H. Heyn, 1868.

K. H. Ulrichs. Incubus. Urningsliebe und Blutgier. Leipzig, A. Serbe, 1869.

K. H. Ulrichs. Argonauticus. Zastrow und die Urninge. Leipzig, A. Serbe, 1869.

K. H. Ulrichs. Prometheus. Beitärge zur Erforschung des Naturräthsels des Uranismus. Leipzig, Serbe, 1870.

K. H. Ulrichs. Araxes. Ruf nach Befreiung der Urningsnatur vom Strafgesetz. Schleiz, Heyn, 1870.

Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass, in "Complete Poems and Prose." 1889-1890.

Walt Whitman. Democratic Vistas.

Nuova Codice Penale per il Regno d'Italia.

A. Coffignon. La Corruption à Paris. Paris, La Librairie Illustrée. 7th edition. No date.

INTRODUCTION.

There is a passion, or a perversion of appetite, which, like all human passions, has played a considerable part in the world's history for good or evil; but which has hardly yet received the philosophical attention and the scientific investigation it deserves. The reason of this may be that in all Christian societies the passion under consideration has been condemned to pariahdom; consequently, philosophy and science have not deigned to make it the subject of special enquiry. Only one great race in past ages, the Greek race, to whom we owe the inheritance of our ideas, succeeded in raising it to the level of chivalrous enthusiasm. Nevertheless, we find it present everywhere and in all periods of history. We cannot take up the religious books, the legal codes, the annals, the descriptions of the manners of any nation, whether large or small, powerful or feeble, civilised or savage, without meeting with this passion in one form or other. Sometimes it assumes the calm and dignified attitude of conscious merit, as in Sparta, Athens, Thebes. Sometimes it skulks in holes and corners, hiding an abashed head and shrinking from the light of day, as in the capitals of modern Europe. It confronts us on the steppes of Asia, where hordes of nomads drink the milk of mares; in the bivouac of Keltish warriors, lying wrapped in wolves' skins round their camp-fires; upon the sands of Arabia, where the Bedaween raise desert dust in flying squadrons. We discern it among the palm-groves of the South Sea Islands, in the card-houses and temple-gardens of Japan, under Esquimaux snow-huts, beneath the sultry vegetation of Peru, beside the streams of Shiraz and the waters of the Ganges, in the cold clear air of Scandinavian winters. It throbs in our huge cities. The pulse of it can be felt in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, no less than in Constantinople, Naples, Teheran, and Moscow. It finds a home in Alpine valleys, Albanian ravines, Californian canyons, and gorges of Caucasian mountains. It once sat, clothed in Imperial purple, on the throne of the Roman Caesars, crowned with the tiara on the chair of St. Peter. It has flaunted, emblazoned with the heraldries of France and England, in coronation ceremonies at Rheims and Westminster. The royal palaces of Madrid and Aranjuez tell their tales of it. So do the ruined courtyards of Granada and the castle-keep of Avignon. It shone with clear radiance in the gymnasium of Hellas, and nerved the dying heroes of Greek freedom for their last forlorn hope upon the plains of Chæronea. Endowed with inextinguishable life, in spite of all that has been done to suppress it, this passion survives at large in modern states and towns, penetrates society, makes itself felt in every quarter of the globe where men are brought into communion with men.

Yet no one dares to speak of it; or if they do, they bate their breath, and preface their remarks with maledictions.

Those who read these lines will hardly doubt what passion it is that I am hinting at. Quod semper ubique et ab omnibus—surely it deserves a name. Yet I can hardly find a name which will not seem to soil this paper. The accomplished languages of Europe in the nineteenth century supply no term for this persistent feature of human psychology, without importing some implication of disgust, disgrace, vituperation. Science, however, has recently—within the last twenty years in fact—invented a convenient phrase, which does not prejudice the matter under consideration. She speaks of the "inverted sexual instinct"; and with this neutral nomenclature the investigator has good reason to be satisfied.

Inverted sexuality, the sexual instinct diverted from its normal channel, directed (in the case of males) to males, forms the topic of the following discourse. The study will be confined to modern times, and to those nations which regard the phenomenon with religious detestation. This renders the enquiry peculiarly difficult, and exposes the enquirer, unless he be a professed expert in diseases of the mind and nervous centres, to almost certain misconstruction. Still, there is no valid reason why the task of statement and analysis should not be undertaken. Indeed, one might rather wonder why candid and curious observers of humanity have not attempted to fathom a problem which faces them at every turn in their historical researches and in daily life. Doubtless their neglect is due to natural or acquired repugnance, to feelings of disgust and hatred, derived from immemorial tradition, and destructive of the sympathies which animate a really zealous pioneer. Nevertheless, what is human is alien to no human being. What the law punishes, but what, in spite of law, persists and energises, ought to arrest attention. We are all of us responsible to some extent for the maintenance and enforcement of our laws. We are all of us, as evolutionary science surely teaches, interested in the facts of anthropology, however repellant some of these may be to our own feelings. We cannot evade the conditions of atavism and heredity. Every family runs the risk of producing a boy or a girl whose life will be embittered by inverted sexuality, but who in all other respects will be no worse or better than the normal members of the home. Surely, then, it is our duty and our interest to learn what we can about its nature, and to arrive through comprehension at some rational method of dealing with it.

I.

CHRISTIAN OPINION.

Since this enquiry is limited to actual conditions of contemporary life, we need not discuss the various ways in which the phenomenon of sexual inversion has been practically treated by races with whose habits and religions we have no affinity.

On the other hand, it is of the highest importance to obtain a correct conception of the steps whereby the Christian nations, separating themselves from ancient paganism, introduced a new and stringent morality into their opinion on this topic, and enforced their ethical views by legal prohibitions of a very formidable kind.

Without prejudging or prejudicing this new morality, now almost universally regarded as a great advance upon the ethics of the earlier pagan world, we must observe that it arose when science was non-existent, when the study of humanity had not emerged from the cradle, and when theology was in the ascendant. We have therefore to expect from it no delicate distinctions, no anthropological investigations, no psychological analysis, and no spirit of toleration. It simply decreed that what had hitherto been viewed as immorality at worst should henceforth be classed among crimes against God, nature, humanity, the state.

Opening the Bible, we find severe penalties attached to sexual inversion by the Mosaic law, in the interests of population and in harmony with the Jewish theory of abominations. The lesson is driven home by the legend of two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, overwhelmed with fire because of their addiction to abnormal sexual indulgences. Here the vindices flammæ of the Roman code appear for the first time—the stake and the flames, which mediæval legislation appointed for offenders of this sort.

St. Paul, penetrated with Hebrew ethics, denounced the corruption of the Gentiles in these words: "For this cause God gave them up into vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet."

Christ uttered no opinion upon what we now call sexual inversion. Neither light nor leading comes from Him, except such as may be indirectly derived from his treatment of the woman taken in adultery.

When the Empire adopted Christianity, it had therefore the traditions of the Mosaic law and the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans to guide its legislators on this topic. The Emperors felt obscurely that the main pulses of human energy were slackening; population all tended to dwindle; the territory of the empire shrank slowly year by year before their eyes. As the depositaries of a higher religion and a nobler morality, they felt it their duty to stamp out pagan customs, and to unfurl the banner of social purity. The corruption of the Roman cities had become abominable. The laziness and cowardice of Roman citizens threatened the commonwealth with ruin. To repress sexual appetites was not the ruler's object. It was only too apparent that these natural desires no longer prompted the people to sufficient procreation or fertility. The brood begotten upon Roman soil was inadequate to cope with the inrushing tide of barbarians. Wisdom lay in attempting to rehabilitate marriage, the family domestic life. Meanwhile a certain vice ran riot through society, a vice for which Jehovah had rained fire and brimstone upon Sodom, a vice which the Mosaic code punished with death, a vice threatened by St. Paul with "that recompence of their error which was meet."

Justinian, in 538 A.D., seems to have been terrified by famines, earthquakes and pestilences. He saw, or professed to see, in these visitations the avenging hand of Jehovah, the "recompence which was meet" mysteriously prophesied by St. Paul. Thereupon he fulminated his edict against unnatural sinners, whereby they were condemned to torments and the supreme penalty of death. The preamble to his famous Novella 77 sets forth the principles on which it has been framed: "Lest as the result of these impious acts whole cities should perish together with their inhabitants; for we are taught by Holy Scripture, to wit that through these acts cities have perished with the men in them.... It is on account of such crimes that famines and earthquakes take place, and also pestilences."

Before Justinian, both Constantine and Theodosius passed laws against sexual inversion, committing the offenders to "avenging flames." But these statutes were not rigidly enforced, and modern opinion on the subject may be said to flow from Justinian's legislation. Opinion, in matters of custom and manners, always follows law. Though Imperial edicts could not eradicate a passion which is inherent in human nature, they had the effect of stereotyping extreme punishments in all the codes of Christian nations, and of creating a permanent social antipathy.

II.

VULGAR ERRORS.

Gibbon's remarks upon the legislation of Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian supply a fair example of the way in which men of learning and open mind have hitherto regarded what, after all, is a phenomenon worthy of cold and calm consideration. "I touch," he says, "with reluctance, and despatch with impatience, a more odious vice, of which modesty rejects the name, and nature abominates the idea." After briefly alluding to the morals of Etruria, Greece, and Rome, he proceeds to the enactments of Constantine: "Adultery was first declared to be a capital offence ... the same penalties were inflicted on the passive and active guilt of pæderasty; and all criminals, of free or servile condition, were either drowned, or beheaded, or cast alive into the avenging flames."[1] Then, without further comment, he observes: "The adulterers were spared by the common sympathy of mankind; but the lovers of their own sex were pursued by general and pious indignation." "Justinian relaxed the punishment at least of female infidelity: the guilty spouse was only condemned to solitude and penance, and at the end of two years she might be recalled to the arms of a forgiving husband. But the same Emperor declared himself the implacable enemy of unmanly lust, and the cruelty of his persecution can scarcely be excused by the purity of his motives. In defiance of every principle of justice he stretched to past as well as future offences the operations of his edicts, with the previous allowance of a short respite for confession and pardon. A painful death was inflicted by the amputation of the sinful instrument, or the insertion of sharp reeds into the pores and tubes of most exquisite sensibility." One consequence of such legislation may be easily foreseen. "A sentence of death and infamy was often founded on the slight and suspicious evidence of a child or a servant: the guilt of the green faction, of the rich, and of the enemies of Theodora, was presumed by the judges, and pæderasty became the crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed."

This state of things has prevailed wherever the edicts of Justinian have been adopted into the laws of nations. The Cathari, the Paterini, the heretics of Provence, the Templars, the Fraticelli, were all accused of unnatural crimes, tortured into confession, and put to death. Where nothing else could be adduced against an unpopular sect, a political antagonist, a wealthy corporation, a rival in literature, a powerful party-leader, unnatural crime was insinuated, and a cry of "Down with the pests of society" prepared the populace for a crusade.

It is the common belief that all subjects of sexual inversion have originally loved women, but that, through monstrous debauchery and superfluity of naughtiness, tiring of normal pleasure, they have wilfully turned their appetites into other channels. This is true about a certain number. But the sequel of this Essay will prove that it does not meet by far the larger proportion of cases, in whom such instincts are inborn, and a considerable percentage in whom they are also inconvertible. Medical jurists and physicians have recently agreed to accept this as a fact.

It is the common belief that a male who loves his own sex must be despicable, degraded, depraved, vicious, and incapable of humane or generous sentiments. If Greek history did not contradict this supposition, a little patient enquiry into contemporary manners would suffice to remove it. But people will not take this trouble about a matter, which, like Gibbon, they "touch with reluctance and despatch with impatience." Those who are obliged to do so find to their surprise that "among the men who are subject to this deplorable vice there are even quite intelligent, talented, and highly-placed persons, of excellent and even noble character."[2] The vulgar expect to discover the objects of their outraged animosity in the scum of humanity. But these may be met with every day in drawing-rooms, law-courts, banks, universities, mess-rooms; on the bench, the throne, the chair of the professor; under the blouse of the workman, the cassock of the priest, the epaulettes of the officer, the smock-frock of the ploughman, the wig of the barrister, the mantle of the peer, the costume of the actor, the tights of the athlete, the gown of the academician.

It is the common belief that one, and only one, unmentionable act is what the lovers seek as the source of their unnatural gratification, and that this produces spinal disease, epilepsy, consumption, dropsy, and the like.[3] Nothing can be more mistaken, as the scientifically reported cases of avowed and adult sinners amply demonstrate. Neither do they invariably or even usually prefer the aversa Venus; nor, when this happens, do they exhibit peculiar signs of suffering in health.[4] Excess in any venereal pleasure will produce diseases of nervous exhaustion and imperfect nutrition. But the indulgence of inverted sexual instincts within due limits, cannot be proved to be especially pernicious. Were it so, the Dorians and Athenians, including Sophocles, Pindar, Æschines, Epaminondas, all the Spartan kings and generals, the Theban legion, Pheidias, Plato, would have been one nation of rickety, phthisical, dropsical paralytics. The grain of truth contained in this vulgar error is that, under the prevalent laws and hostilities of modern society, the inverted passion has to be indulged furtively, spasmodically, hysterically; that the repression of it through fear and shame frequently leads to habits of self-abuse; and that its unconquerable solicitations sometimes convert it from a healthy outlet of the sexual nature into a morbid monomania.[5] It is also true that professional male prostitutes, like their female counterparts, suffer from local and constitutional disorders, as is only natural.[6]

It is the common belief that boys under age are specially liable to corruption. This error need not be confuted here. Anyone who chooses to read the cases recorded by Casper-Liman, Casper in his Novellen, Krafft-Ebing, and Ulrichs, or to follow the developments of the present treatise, or to watch the manners of London after dark, will be convicted of its absurdity. Young boys are less exposed to dangers from abnormal than young girls from normal voluptuaries.

It is the common belief that all subjects from inverted instinct carry their lusts written in their faces; that they are pale, languid, scented, effeminate, painted, timid, oblique in expression. This vulgar error rests upon imperfect observation. A certain class of such people are undoubtedly feminine. From their earliest youth they have shown marked inclination for the habits and the dress of women; and when they are adult, they do everything in their power to obliterate their manhood. It is equally true that such unsexed males possess a strong attraction for some abnormal individuals. But it is a gross mistake to suppose that all the tribe betray these attributes. The majority differ in no detail of their outward appearance, their physique, or their dress from normal men. They are athletic, masculine in habits, frank in manner, passing through society year after year without arousing a suspicion of their inner temperament. Were it not so, society would long ago have had its eyes opened to the amount of perverted sexuality it harbours.

The upshot of this discourse on vulgar errors is that popular opinion is made up of a number of contradictory misconceptions and confusions. Moreover, it has been taken for granted that "to investigate the depraved instincts of humanity is unprofitable and disgusting." Consequently the subject has been imperfectly studied; and individuals belonging to radically different species are confounded in one vague sentiment of reprobation. Assuming that they are all abominable, society is content to punish them indiscriminately. The depraved debauchee who abuses boys receives the same treatment as the young man who loves a comrade. The male prostitute who earns his money by extortion is scarcely more contemned than a man of birth and breeding who has been seen walking with soldiers.

III.

LITERATURE—DESCRIPTIVE.

Sexual inversion can boast a voluminous modern literature, little known to general readers. A considerable part of this is pornographic, and need not arrest our attention.[7] A good deal is descriptive, scientific, historical, anthropological, apologetical and polemical. With a few books in each of these kinds I propose to deal now.

The first which falls under my hand is written by a French official, who was formerly Chief of the Police Department for Morals in Paris.[8] M. Carlier, during ten years, had excellent opportunities for studying the habits of professional male prostitutes and their frequenters. He had condensed the results of his experience in seven very disagreeable chapters, which offer a revolting picture of vice and systematised extortion in the great metropolis.

"In the numerous books," says M. Carlier, "which treat of prostitution, the antiphysical passions have hitherto been always deliberately omitted. Officially, public opinion does not recognise them, the legislature will take no notice of them. The police are left alone to react against them; and the unequal combat may some day cease, since it is supported by no text of the code and no regulation of the state. When that happens, pæderasty will become a calamity far more dangerous, more scandalous, than female prostitution, the organisation of which it shares in full. A magistrate once declared that 'in Paris it is the school where the cleverest and boldest criminals are formed; and as a matter of fact, it produces associations of special scoundrels, who use it as the means of theft and chantage, not stopping short of murder in the execution of their plots.'"

It will be seen from this exordium that M. Carlier regards the subject wholly from the point of view of prostitution. He has proved abundantly that male prostitution is organised in Paris upon the same system as its female counterpart, and he has demonstrated that this system is attended with the same dangers to society.

A violent animus against antiphysical passions makes him exaggerate these dangers, for it is clear that normal vice is no less free from sordid demoralisation and crimes of violence than its abnormal twin-brother. Both are fornication; and everywhere, in Corinth as in Sodom, the prostitute goes hand in hand with the bully, the robber, and the cut-throat.

With reference to the legal position of these passions in France, he says: "Pæderasty is not punished by our laws. It can only come within the reach of the code by virtue of circumstances under which it may be practised. If the facts take place in the presence of witnesses, or in a place open to public observation, there will be an outrage to decency. If minors are seduced, there may be proof of the habitual incitement of minors to debauch, corruption, or even rape. But the passion itself is not subject to penalty; it is only a vice arising from one of the seven deadly sins. We have no intention of analysing this perverted instinct. Since the law does not regard it, we will do like the law. We will pass in silence all its private details, occupying ourselves only with what meets the eye, with what may be called a veritable prostitution."

M. Carlier proceeds to describe the two main classes, which in France are known as tantes and amateurs. The former are subdivided into minor branches, under the names of jésus, petits jésus, corvettes (naval), soldiers. The latter, called also rivettes, are distinguished by their tastes for different sorts of tantes.

Those who are interested in such matters may turn to M. Carlier's pages for minute information regarding the habits, coteries, houses of debauch, bullies, earnings, methods of extortion, dwellings, balls, banquets, and even wedding-parties of these people. A peculiar world of clandestine vice in a great city is revealed; and the authentic documents, abundantly presented, render the picture vivid in its details. From the official papers which passed through M. Carlier's bureau during ten years (1860-70), he compiles a list of 6,342 pæderasts who came within the cognisance of the police: 2,049 Parisians, 3,709 provincials, 484 foreigners. Of these 3,532, or more than the half, could not be convicted of illegal acts.

While devoting most of his attention to professionals who dress like women, and have become exactly similar to the effeminated youth described in Monsieur Vénus,[9] Carlier gives some curious details about the French army. Soldiers are no less sought after in France than in England or in Germany, and special houses exist for military prostitution both in Paris and the garrison towns.[10] Upon this point it should be remarked that Carlier expresses a very strong opinion regarding the contagiousness of antiphysical passion. And certainly many facts known about the French army go to prove that these habits have been contracted in Algeria, and have spread to a formidable extent through whole regiments.[11]

In conclusion, M. Carlier, though he so strongly deplores the impunity extended by French law to sexual inversion, admits that this has not augmented the evil. Speaking about England, where legal penalties are heavy enough, he says; "Though they call it the nameless crime there, it has in England at least as many votaries as in France, and they are quite as depraved."[12]

IV.

LITERATURE—MEDICO-FORENSIC.

Carlier's book deals with the external aspects of inverted sexuality, as this exists in Paris under the special form of prostitution. The author professes to know nothing more about the subject than what came beneath his notice in the daily practice of his trade as a policeman. He writes with excusable animosity. We see at once that he is neither a philosopher by nature, nor a man of science, but only a citizen, endowed with the normal citizen's antipathy for passions alien to his own. Placed at the head of the Bureau of Morals, Carlier was brought into collision with a tribe of people whom he could not legally arrest, but whom he cordially hated. They were patently vicious; and (what was peculiarly odious to the normal man) these degraded beings were all males. He saw that the public intolerance of "antiphysical passions," which he warmly shared, encouraged an organised system of chantage. Without entertaining the question whether public opinion might be modified, he denounced the noxious gang as pests of society. The fact that England, with her legal prohibitions, suffered to the same extent as France from the curse of "pæderasty," did not make him pause. Consequently, the light which he has thrown upon the subject of this treatise only illuminates the dark dens of male vice in a big city. He leaves us where we were about the psychological and ethical problem. He shows what deep roots the passion strikes in the centres of modern civilisation, and how it thrives under conditions at once painful to its victims and embarrassing to an agent of police.

Writers on forensic medicine take the next place in the row of literary witnesses. It is not their business to investigate the psychological condition of persons submitted to the action of the laws. They are concerned with the law itself, and with those physical circumstances which may bring the accused within its operation, or may dismiss him free from punishment.

Yet their function, by importing the quality of the physician into the sphere of jurisprudence, renders them more apprehensive of the underlying problem than a mere agent of police. We expect impartial scientific scrutiny in such authorities, and to some extent we find it.

The leading writers on forensic medicine at the present time in Europe are Casper (edited by Liman) for Germany, Tardieu for France, and Taylor for England. Taylor is so reticent upon the subject of unnatural crime that his handbook on "The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence" does not demand minute examination. It may, however, be remarked that he believes false accusations to be even commoner in this matter than in the case of rape, since they are only too frequently made the means of blackmailing. For this reason he leaves the investigation of such crimes to the lawyers.

Both Casper and Tardieu discuss the topic of sexual inversion with antipathy. But there are notable points of difference in the method and in the conclusions of the two authors. Tardieu, perhaps because he is a Frenchman, educated in the school of Paris, which we have learned to know from Carlier, assumes that all subjects of the passion are criminal or vicious. He draws no psychological distinction between pæderast and pæderast. He finds no other name for them, and looks upon the whole class as voluntarily degraded beings who, for the gratification of monstrous desires, have unsexed themselves. A large part of his work is devoted to describing what he believes to be the signs of active and passive immorality in the bodies of persons addicted to these habits.[13] It is evident that imagination has acted powerfully in the formation of his theories. But this is not the place to discuss their details.[14]

Casper and Liman approach the subject with almost equal disgust, but with more regard for scientific truth than Tardieu. They point out that the term pæderast is wholly inadequate to describe the several classes of male persons afflicted with sexual inversion. They clearly expect, in course of time, a general mitigation of the penalties in force against such individuals. According to them, the penal laws of North Germany, on the occasion of their last revision, would probably have been altered, had not the jurists felt that the popular belief in the criminality of pæderasts ought to be considered.[15] Consequently, a large number of irresponsible persons, in the opinion of experts like Casper and Liman, are still exposed to punishment by laws enacted under the influence of vulgar errors.

These writers are not concerned with the framing of codes, nor again with the psychological diagnosis of accused persons. It is their business to lay down rules whereby a medical authority, consulted in a doubtful case, may form his own view as to the guilt or innocence of the accused. Their attention is therefore mainly directed to the detection of signs upon the bodies of incriminated individuals.

This question of physical diagnosis leads them into a severe critique of Tardieu. Their polemic attacks each of the points which he attempted to establish. I must content myself by referring to the passage of their work which deals with the important topic.[16] Suffice it here to say that they reject all signs as worse than doubtful, except a certain deformation of one part of the body, which may possibly be taken as the proof of habitual prostitution, when it occurs in quite young persons. Of course they admit that wounds, violent abrasions of the skin, in certain places, and some syphilitic affections strongly favour the presumption of a criminal act. Finally, after insisting on the insecurity of Tardieu's alleged signs, and pointing out the responsibility assumed by physicians who base a judgment on them, the two Germans sum up their conclusions in the following words (p. 178): "It is extremely remarkable that while Tardieu mentions 206 cases, and communicates a select list of 19, which appear to him to exhibit these peculiar conformations of the organs, he can only produce one single instance where the formation seemed indubitable. Let anyone peruse his 19 cases, and he will be horrified at the unhesitating condemnations pronounced by Tardieu." The two notes of exclamation which close this sentence in the original are fully justified. It is indeed horrifying to think that a person, implicated in some foul accusation, may have his doom fixed by a doctrinaire like Tardieu. Antipathy and ignorance in judges and the public, combined with erroneous canons of evidence in the expert, cannot fail to lead in such cases to some serious miscarriage of justice.

Passing from the problem of diagnosis and the polemic against Tardieu, it must be remarked that Casper was the first writer of this class to lay down the distinction between inborn and acquired perversion of the sexual instinct. The law does not recognise this distinction. If a criminal act be proved, the psychological condition of the agent is legally indifferent—unless it can be shown that he was clearly mad and irresponsible, in which case he may be consigned to a lunatic asylum instead of a jail. But Casper and Liman, having studied the question of sexual maladies in general, and given due weight to the works of Ulrichs, call attention to the broad differences which exist between persons in whom abnormal appetites are innate and those in whom they are acquired. Their companion sketches of the two types deserve to be translated and presented in a somewhat condensed form.[17]

"In the majority of persons who are subject to this vice, it is congenital; or at any rate the sexual inclination can be followed back into the years of childhood, like a kind of physical hermaphroditism. Sexual contact with a woman inspires them with real disgust. Their imagination delights in handsome young men, and statues or pictures of the same. In the case of this numerous class of pæderasts there is therefore no depraved fancy at work, no demoralisation through satiety of natural sexual appetite,[18] Their congenital impulse explains the fact, moreover, that very many pæderasts are addicted to what may be termed a Platonic voluptuousness, and feel themselves drawn towards the objects of their desire with a warmth of passion more fervent than is common in the relations of the opposed sexes; that, in other cases again, they are satisfied with embracements, from which they derive a mutual pleasure. Westphal maintains that this anomalous direction of the sexual appetite is more often the symptom of a psychopathical, neuropathical condition than people commonly suppose."[19]

"In the case of another class of men, upon the contrary, the taste for this vice has been acquired in life, and is the result of over-satiety with natural pleasures. People of this stamp sometimes indulge their gross appetites alternately with either sex. I once observed a man, after contracting a venereal disease with women, adopt pæderasty out of fear of another infection; but he was, it must be admitted, a weak-minded individual. In all the great towns of Europe the vice goes creeping around, unobserved by the uninitiated. It appears that there is no inhabited spot of the globe where it may not be discovered. I said, unobserved by the uninitiated, advisedly. In antiquity the members of the sect had their own means of mutual recognition. And at the present time, these men know each other at first sight; moreover, they are found everywhere, in every station of society, without a single exception. 'We recognise each other at once,' says the writer of a report which I shall communicate below: 'A mere glance of the eye suffices; and I have never been deceived. On the Rigi, at Palermo, in the Louvre, in the Highlands of Scotland, in Petersburg, on disembarking at the port of Barcelona, I have found people, never seen by me before, and whom I discriminated in a second.' Several men of this sort whom I have known (continues Casper) are certainly accustomed to dress and adorn themselves in a rather feminine way. Nevertheless, there are indisputable pæderasts, who present an entirely different aspect, some of them elderly and negligent in their attire, and people of the lower classes, distinguished by absolutely nothing in their exterior from other persons of the same rank."

Medico-juristic science made a considerable step when Casper adopted this distinction of two types of sexual inversion. But, as is always the case in the analysis of hitherto neglected phenomena, his classification falls far short of the necessities of the problem. While treating of acquired sexual inversion, he only thinks of debauchees. He does not seem to have considered a deeper question—deeper in its bearing upon the way in which society will have to deal with the whole problem—the question of how far these instincts are capable of being communicated by contagion to persons in their fullest exercise of sexual vigour. Taste, fashion, preference, as factors in the dissemination of anomalous passions, he has left out of his account. It is also, but this is a minor matter, singular that he should have restricted his observations on the freemasonry among pæderasts to those in whom the instinct is acquired. That exists quite as much or even more among those in whom it is congenital.

The upshot of the whole matter, however, is that the best book on medical jurisprudence now extant repudiates the enormities of Tardieu's method, and lays it down for proved that "the majority of persons who are subject" to sexual inversion come into the world, or issue from the cradle, with their inclination clearly marked.

V.

LITERATURE—MEDICINE.

Medical writers upon this subject are comparatively numerous in French and German literature, and they have been multiplying rapidly of late years. The phenomenon of sexual inversion is usually regarded in these books from the point of view of psychopathic or neuropathic derangement, inherited from morbid ancestors, and developed in the patient by early habits of self-abuse.

What is the exact distinction between "psychopathic" and "neuropathic" I do not know. The former term seems intelligible in the theologian's mouth, the latter in a physician's. But I cannot understand both being used together to indicate different kinds of pathological diathesis. What is the soul, what are the nerves? We have probably to take the two terms as indicating two ways of considering the same phenomenon; the one subjective, the other objective; "psychopathic" pointing to the derangement as observed in the mind emotions of its subject; "neuropathic" to the derangement as observed in anomalies of the nervous system.

It would be impossible, in an essay of this kind, to review the whole mass of medical observation, inference and speculation which we have at our command. Nor is a layman, perhaps, well qualified for the task of criticism and comparison in a matter of delicacy where doctors differ as to details. I shall therefore content myself with giving an account of four of the most recent, most authoritative, and, as it seems to me, upon the whole most sensible studies. Moreau, Tarnowsky, Krafft-Ebing and Lombroso take very nearly similar views of the phenomenon; and between them they are gradually forming a theory which is likely to become widely accepted.

Des Aberrations du Sens Génésique, par le Dr. Paul Moreau, 4th edition, 1887.

Moreau starts with the proposition that there is a sixth sense, "le sens génital," which, like other senses, can be injured psychically and physically without the mental functions, whether affective or intellectual, suffering thereby. His book is therefore a treatise on the diseases of the sexual sense. These diseases are by no means of recent origin, he says. They have always and everywhere existed.

He begins with a historical survey, which, so far as antiquity is concerned, is very defective. Having quoted with approval the following passage about Greek society:—

"La sodomie se répand dans toute la Grèce; les écoles des philosophes deviennent des maisons de débauche, et les grands exemples d'amitié légués par le paganisme ne sont, pour la plupart, qu'une infâme turpitude voilée par une sainte apparence": having quoted these words of Dr. Descuret, Moreau leaves Greece alone, and goes on to Rome. The state of morals in Rome under the empire he describes as "une dépravation maladive, devenue par la force des choses héréditaire, endémique, épidémique." Then follows a short account of the emperors and their female relatives. "Cet éréthisme génésique qui, pendant près de deux siècles, régna a l'état épidémique dans Rome" he ascribes mainly to heredity. Of Julia, the daughter of Augustus, he says, "Peut-on lutter contre un état morbide héréditaire?" The union of unrestrained debauchery and ferocity with great mental gifts strikes him as a note of disease; and he winds up with this sentence: "Parmi les causes les plus fréquentes des aberrations du sens génital, l'hérédité tient la première place."

Then he passes to the middle ages, and dwells upon the popular belief in incubi and succubi. It is curious to find him placing Leo X., François I., Henri IV., Louis XIV., among the neuropathics. When it comes to this, everybody with strong sexual instincts, and the opportunity of indulging them, is a nervous invalid. Modern times are illustrated by the debaucheries of the Regency, the reign of Louis XV., Russian ladies, the Marquis de Sade. The House of Orleans seems in truth to have been tainted with hereditary impudicity of a morbid kind. But if it was so at the end of the last century, it has since the Revolution remarkably recovered health—by what miracle?

Moreau now formulates the thesis he wishes to prove: "L'aberration pathologique des sentiments génésiques doit être assimilée complètement à une névrose, et, comme telle, son existence est compatible avec les plus hautes intelligences." He discovers hereditary taint universally present in these cases. "Hérédité directe, hérédité indirecte, hérédité transformée, se trouve chez les génésiaques."

Passing to etiology, he rests mainly upon an organism predisposed by ancestry, and placed in a milieu favourable to its morbid development. Provocative causes are not sufficient to awake the aberration in healthy organisms, but the least thing will set a predisposed organism on the track. This, I may observe, seems to preclude simple imitation, upon which Moreau afterwards lays considerable stress; for if none but the already tainted can be influenced by their milieu, none but the tainted will imitate.

What he calls "General Physical Causes" are (1) Extreme Poverty, (2) Age, (3) Constitution, (4) Temperament, (5) Seasons of the Year, (6) Climate, (7) Food.

Extreme poverty leads to indiscriminate vice, incest, sodomy, &c. That is true, and we know that our city poor and the peasants of some countries are habitually immoral. Yet Moreau proves too much here. For, according to his principles, hereditary neurosis ought by this time to have become chronic, epidemic, endemic, in all the city poor and in all the peasants of all countries; which is notably not the fact. Puberty and the approach of senility are pointed out as times when genesiac symptoms manifest themselves. His observations upon the other points are commonplace enough; and he repeats the current notion that inhabitants of hot climates are more lascivious than those of the North.

Among "Individual Physical Causes," Moreau treats of malformation of the sexual organs, diseases of those organs, injuries to the organism by wounds, blows, poisons, masturbation, excessive indulgence in venery, and exaggerated continence.

When we come to "General Moral Causes," heredity plays the first part. This may be direct, i.e., the son of a genesiac will have the same tastes as his father, or transformed; what is phthisis in one generation assuming the form of sexual aberration in another. Bad education and exposure to bad examples, together with imitation, are insisted on more vaguely.

The "Individual Moral Causes" include impressions received in early youth, on which I think perhaps Moreau does not lay sufficient stress, and certain tendencies to subjective preoccupations with ideal ideas, certain abnormal physical conditions which disturb the whole moral sensibility.

Passing to Pathological Anatomy, Moreau declares that it is as yet impossible to localise the sexual sense. The brain, the cerebellum, the spinal marrow? We do not know. He seems to incline toward the cerebellum.

It is not necessary to follow Moreau in his otherwise interesting account of the various manifestations of sexual disease. The greater part of these have no relation to the subject of my work. But what he says in passing about "pæderasts, sodomites, saphists," has to be resumed. He reckons them among "A class of individuals who cannot and ought not to be confounded either with men enjoying the fulness of their intellectual faculties, or yet with madmen properly so called. They form an intermediate class, a mixed class, constituting a real link of union between reason and madness, the nature and existence of which can most frequently be explained only by one word: Heredity" (p. 159). It is surprising, after this announcement, to discover that what he has to say about sexual inversion is limited to Europe and its moral system, "having nothing to do with the morals of other countries where pæderasty is accepted and admitted" (p. 172, note). Literally, then, he regards sexual inversion in modern Christian Europe as a form of hereditary neuropathy, a link between reason and madness; but in ancient Greece, in modern Persia and Turkey, he regards the same psychological anomaly from the point of view, not of disease, but of custom. In other words, an Englishman or a Frenchman who loves the male sex must be diagnosed as tainted with disease; while Sophocles, Pindar, Pheidias, Epaminondas, Plato, are credited with yielding to an instinct which was healthy in their times because society accepted it. The inefficiency of this distinction in a treatise of analytical science ought to be indicated. The bare fact that ancient Greece tolerated, and that modern Europe refuses to tolerate sexual inversion, can have nothing to do with the etiology, the pathology, the psychological definition of the phenomenon in its essence. What has to be faced is that a certain type of passion flourished under the light of day and bore good fruits for society in Hellas; that the same type of passion flourishes in the shade and is the source of misery and shame in Europe. The passion has not altered; but the way of regarding it morally and legally is changed. A scientific investigator ought not to take changes of public opinion into account when he is analysing a psychological peculiarity.

This point on which I am insisting—namely, that it is illogical to treat sexual inversion among the modern European races as a malady, when you refer its prevalence among Oriental peoples and the ancient Hellenes to custom—is so important that I shall illustrate it by a passage from one of Dr. W. R. Huggard's Essays.[20] "It may be said that the difference between the delusion of the overpowering impulse in the Fijian and in the insane Englishman is that, in the savage, the mental characters are due to education and surroundings; while, in the lunatic they are due to disease. In a twofold manner, however, would this explanation fail. On the one hand, even if in the Fijian there were disease, the question of insanity could not arise in regard to a matter considered by his society to be one of indifference. It would be absurd to talk of homicidal mania, of nymphomania, and of kleptomania, as forms of insanity, where murder, promiscuous intercourse, and stealing are not condemned. On the other hand, the assumption that insanity is always due to disease is not merely an unproved, but an improbable supposition. There must, of course, be some defect of organism; but there is every reason to think that, in many cases, the defect is of the nature of a congenital lack of balance between structures themselves healthy; and that many cases of insanity might properly be regarded as a kind of 'throwback' to a type of organisation now common among the lower races of mankind." Substitute any term to indicate sexual inversion for "nymphomania" in this paragraph, and the reasoning precisely suits my argument. It is interesting, by the way, to find this writer agreeing with Ulrichs in his suggestion of a "congenital lack of balance between structures themselves healthy," and with Lombroso in his supposition of atavistic reversion to savagery. Lombroso, we shall see, ultimately identifies congenital criminality (one form of which is sexual aberration in this theory) with moral insanity; and here Dr. Huggard is, unconsciously perhaps, in agreement with him; for he defines insanity to be "any mental defect that renders a person unable (and not capable of being made able by punishment) to conform to the requirements of society"—a definition which is no less applicable to the born criminal than to the madman.

How little Dr. Moreau has weighed the importance of ancient Greece in his discussion of this topic, appears from the omission of all facts supplied by Greek literature and history in the introduction to his Essay. He dilates upon the legends recorded by the Roman Emperors, because these seem to support his theory of hereditary malady. He uses Juvenal, Tacitus, Suetonius, and the Augustan Histories to support his position, although they form part of the annals of a people among whom "pæderasty was accepted and admitted." He ignores the biographies of the Spartan kings, the institutions of Crete, the Theban Sacred Band, the dialogues of Plato, the anecdotes related about Pheidias, Sophocles, Pindar, Demosthenes, Alcibiades, and so forth. Does he perhaps do so because they cannot in any way be made to square with his theory of morbidity? The truth is that ancient Greece offers insuperable difficulties to theorists who treat sexual inversion exclusively from the points of view of neuropathy, tainted heredity, and masturbation. And how incompetent Dr. Moreau is to deal with Greek matters may be seen in the grotesque synonym he has invented for pæderasty-philopodie (p. 173). Properly the word is compounded of φιλεἱν and πους; but I suppose it is meant to suggest φιλεἱν and podex.

In a chapter on Legal Medicine, Moreau starts by observing that "The facts are so monstrous, so tainted with aberration, and yet their agents offer so strong an appearance of sound reason, occupy such respectable positions in the world, are reputed to enjoy such probity, such honourable sentiments, &c., that one hesitates to utter an opinion." Proceeding further, he considers it sufficiently established that: "Not unfrequently, under the influence of some vice of organism, generally of heredity, the moral faculties may undergo alterations, which, if they do not actually destroy the social relations of the individual, as happens in cases of declared insanity, yet modify them to a remarkable degree, and certainly demand to be taken into account, when we have to estimate the morality of these acts" (p. 301). His conclusion, therefore, is that the aberrations of the sexual sense, including its inversion, are matters for the physician rather than the judge, for therapeutics rather than punishment, and that representatives of the medical faculty ought to sit upon the bench as advisers or assessors when persons accused of outrages against decency come to trial. "While we blame and stigmatise these crimes with reason, the horrified intellect seeks an explanation and a moral excuse (nothing more) for such odious acts. It insists on asking what can have brought a man honourably known in society, enjoying (apparently at least) the fulness of his mental faculties, to these base and shameful self-indulgences. We answer: Such men for the most part are abnormal intelligences, veritable candidates for lunacy, and, what is more, they are the subjects of hereditary maladies. But let us cast a veil over a subject so humiliating to the honour of humanity!" (p. 177).

As the final result of this analysis, Moreau classifies sexual inversion with erotomania, nymphomania, satyriasis, bestiality, rape, profanation of corpses, &c., as the symptom of a grave lesion of the procreative sense. He seeks to save its victims from the prison by delivering them over to the asylum. His moral sentiments are so revolted that he does not even entertain the question whether their instincts are natural and healthy though abnormal. Lastly, he refuses to face the aspects of this psychological anomaly which are forced upon the student of ancient Hellas. He does not even take into account the fact, patent to experienced observers, that simple folk not unfrequently display no greater disgust for the abnormalities of sexual appetite than they do for its normal manifestations.[21]

Die krankhaften Erscheinungen des Geschlechtssinnes. B. Tarnowsky. Berlin, Hirschwald, 1886.

This is avowedly an attempt to distinguish the morbid kinds of sexual perversion from the merely vicious, and to enforce the necessity of treating the former not as criminal but as pathological. "The forensic physician discerns corruption, oversatiated sensuality, deep-rooted vice, perverse will, &c., where the clinical observer recognises with certainty a morbid condition of the patient marked by typical steps of development and termination. Where the one wishes to punish immorality, the other pleads for the necessity of methodical therapeutic treatment."

The author is a Russian, whose practice in St. Petersburg has brought him into close professional relations with the male prostitutes and habitual pæderasts of that capital.

He is able therefore to speak with authority, on the ground of a quite exceptional knowledge of the moral and physical disturbances connected with sodomy. I cannot but think that the very peculiarities of his experience have led him to form incomplete theories. He is too familiar with venal pathics, pædicators, and effeminates who prostitute their bodies in the grossest way, to be able to appreciate the subtler bearings of the problem.

Tarnowsky makes two broad divisions of sexual inversion. The first kind is inborn, dependent upon hereditary taint and neuropathic diathesis. He distinguishes three sorts of inborn perversity. In the most marked of its forms it is chronic and persistent, appearing with the earliest dawn of puberty, unmodified by education, attaining to its maximum of intensity in manhood, manifesting, in fact, all the signs of ordinary sexual inclination. In a second form it is not chronic and persistent, but periodical. The patient is subject to occasional disturbances of the nervous centres, which express themselves in violent and irresistible attacks of the perverted instinct. The third form is epileptical.

With regard to acquired sexual inversion, he dwells upon the influence of bad example, the power of imitation, fashion, corrupt literature, curiosity in persons jaded with normal excesses. Extraordinary details are given concerning the state of schools in Russia (pp. 63-65); and a particular case is mentioned, in which Tarnowsky himself identified twenty-nine passive pæderasts, between the ages of nine and fifteen, in a single school. He had been called in to pronounce upon the causes of an outbreak of syphilis among the pupils. Interesting information is also communicated regarding the prevalence of abnormal vice in St. Petersburg, where it appears that bath-men, cab-drivers, care-takers of houses, and artisans are particularly in request (pp. 98-101). The Russian people show no repugnance for what they call "gentlemen's tricks." Tarnowsky calls attention to ships, garrisons, prisons, as milieux well calculated for the development of this vice, when it had once been introduced by some one tainted with it. His view about nations like the Greeks, the Persians, and the Afghans is that, through imitation, fashion, and social toleration, it has become endemic. But all the sorts of abnormality included under the title of acquired Tarnowsky regards as criminal. The individual ought, he thinks, to be punished by the law. He naturally includes under this category of acquired perversion the vices of old debauchees. At this point, however, his classification becomes confused; for he shows how senile tendencies to sodomitic passion are frequently the symptom of approaching brain disease, to which the reason and the constitution of the patient will succumb. French physicians call this "la pédérastie des ramollis."

Returning to what Tarnowsky says about the inborn species of sexual inversion, I may call attention to an admirable description of the type in general (pp. 11-15) I think, however, that he lays too great stress upon the passivity of the emotions in these persons, their effeminacy of press, habits, inclinations. He is clearly speaking from large experience. So it must be supposed that he has not come across frequent instances of men who feel, look, and act like men, the only difference between them and normal males being that they love their own sex. In describing a second degree of the aberration (pp. 16, 17), he still accentuates effeminacy in dress and habits beyond the point which general observation would justify. Careful study of the cases adduced in Krafft-Ebing's "Psychopathia" supplies a just measure for the criticism of Tarnowsky upon this head. From them we learn that effeminacy of physique and habit is by no means a distinctive mark of the born pæderast. Next it may be noticed that Tarnowsky believes even innate and hereditary tendencies can be modified and overcome by proper moral, and physique discipline in youth, and that the subjects of them will even be brought to marry in some cases (pp. 17, 18).

It would not serve any purpose of utility here to follow Tarnowsky into further details regarding the particular forms assumed by perverted appetite. But attention must be directed to his definition of hereditary predisposition (pp. 33-35). This is extraordinarily wide. He regards every disturbance of the nervous system in an ancestor as sufficient; epilepsy, brain disease, hysteria, insanity. He includes alcoholism, syphilitic affections, pneumonia, typhus, physical exhaustion, excessive anæmia, debauchery, "anything in short which is sufficient to enfeeble the nervous system and the sexual potency of the parent." At this point he remarks that long residence at high altitudes tends to weaken the sexual activity and to develop perversity, adducing an old belief of the Persians that pæderastia originated in the high plateau of Armenia (p. 35). It need hardly, I think, be said that these theories are contradicted to the fullest extent by the experience of those who have lived with the mountaineers of Central Europe. They are indeed capable of continence to a remarkable degree, but they are also vigorously procreative and remarkably free from sexual inversion.

Finally, it must be observed that Tarnowsky discusses the physical signs of active and passive sodomy at some length (108-135). His opportunities of physical observation in medical practice as the trusted physician of the St. Petersburg pæderasts gives him the right to speak with authority. The most decisive thing he says is that Casper, through want of familiarity with the phenomena, is too contemptuous toward one point in Tardieu's theory. In short, Tarnowsky feels sure that a habitual passive pæderast will show something like the sign in question, if examined by an expert in the proper position. But that is the only deformation of the body on which he relies.

Psychopathia Sexualis, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Conträren Sexualempfindung. Von Dr. R. v. Krafft-Ebing. Stuttgart, Enke, 1889.

Krafft-Ebing took the problem of sexual inversion up when it had been already investigated by a number of pioneers and predecessors. They mapped the ground out, and established a kind of psychical chart. We have seen the medical system growing in the works of Moreau and Tarnowsky. If anything, Krafft-Ebing's treatment suffers from too much subdivision and parade of classification. It is only, however, by following the author in his differentiation of the several species that we can form a conception of his general theory, and of the extent of the observations upon which this is based. He starts with (A) Sexual Inversion as an acquired morbid phenomenon. Then he reviews (B) Sexual Inversion as an inborn morbid phenomenon.

(A) "Sexual feeling and sexual instinct," he begins, "remain latent, except in obscure foreshadowings and impulses, until the time when the organs of procreation come to be developed. During the period of latency, when sex has not arrived at consciousness, is only potentially existent, and has no powerful organic bias, influences may operate, injurious to its normal and natural evolution. In that case the germinating sexual sensibility runs a risk of being both qualitatively and quantitatively impaired, and under certain circumstances may even be perverted into a false channel. Tarnowsky has already published this experience. I can thoroughly confirm it, and am prepared to define the conditions of this acquired, or, in other words, this cultivated perversion of the sexual instinct in the following terms. The fundamental or ground predisposition is a neuropathic hereditary bias. The exciting or efficient cause is sexual abuse, and more particularly onanism. The etiological centre of gravity has to be sought in hereditary disease; and I think it is questionable whether an untainted individual is capable of homosexual feelings at all."[22]

Krafft-Ebing's theory seems then to be that all cases of acquired sexual inversion may be ascribed in the first place to morbid predispositions inherited by the patient (Belastung), and in the second place to onanism as the exciting cause of the latent neuropathic ailment.

He excludes the hypothesis of a physiological and healthy deflection from the normal rule of sex. "I think it questionable," he says, "whether the untainted individual (das unbelastete Individuum) is capable of homosexual feelings at all." The importance of this sentence will be apparent when we come to deal with Krafft-Ebing's account of congenital sexual inversion, which he establishes upon a large induction of cases observed in his own practice.

For the present we have the right to assume that Krafft-Ebing regards sexual inversion, whether "acquired" or "congenital," as a form of inherited neuropathy (Belastung). In cases where it seems to be "acquired," he lays stress upon the habit of self-pollution.

This is how he states his theory of onanism as an exciting cause of inherited neuropathy, resulting in sexual inversion. The habit of self-abuse prepares the patient for abnormal appetites by weakening his nervous force, degrading his sexual imagination, and inducing hyper-sensibility in his sexual apparatus. Partial impotence is not unfrequently exhibited. In consequence of this sophistication of his nature, the victim of inherited neuropathy and onanism feels shy with women, and finds it convenient to frequent persons of his own sex. In other words, it is supposed to be easier for an individual thus broken down at the centres of his life to defy the law and to demand sexual gratification from men than to consort with venal women in a brothel.

Krafft-Ebing assumes that males who have been born with neuropathic ailments of an indefinite kind will masturbate, destroy their virility, and then embark upon a course of vice which offers incalculable dangers, inconceivable difficulties, and inexpressible repugnances. That is the theory. But whence, if not from some overwhelming appetite, do the demoralised victims of self-abuse derive courage for facing the obstacles which a career of sexual inversion carries with it in our civilisation? One would have thought that such people, if they could not approach a prostitute in a brothel, would have been unable to solicit a healthy man upon the streets. The theory seems to be constructed in order to elude the fact that the persons designated are driven by a natural impulse into paths far more beset with difficulties than those of normal libertines.

Krafft-Ebing gives the details of five cases of "acquired" sexual inversion. Three of these were the children of afflicted parents. One had no morbid strain in his ancestry, except pulmonary consumption. The fifth sprang from a strong father and a healthy mother. Masturbation entered into the history of all.

It must be observed, in criticising Krafft-Ebing's theory, that it is so constructed as to render controversy almost impossible. If we point out that a large percentage of males who practise onanism in their adolescence do not acquire sexual inversion, he will answer that these were not tainted with hereditary disease. The autobiographies of onanists and passionate woman-lovers (J. J. Rousseau, for example, who evinced a perfect horror of homosexual indulgence, and J. J. Bouchard, whose disgusting excentricities were directed toward females even in the period of his total impotence) will be dismissed with the remark that the ancestors of these writers must have shown a clean record.

It is difficult to square Krafft-Ebing's theory with the phenomena presented by schools, both public and private, in all parts of Europe. In these institutions not only is masturbation practised to a formidable extent, but it is also everywhere connected with some form of sexual inversion, either passionately Platonic or grossly sensual. Nevertheless, we know that few of the boys addicted to these practices remain abnormal after they have begun to frequent women. The same may be said about convict establishments, military prisons, and the like.[23] With such a body of facts staring us in the face, it cannot be contended that "only tainted individuals are capable of homosexual feelings." Where females are absent or forbidden, males turn for sexual gratification to males. And in certain conditions of society sexual inversion may become permanently established, recognised, all but universal. It would be absurd to maintain that all the boy-lovers of ancient Greece owed their instincts to hereditary neuropathy complicated with onanism.

The invocation of heredity in problems of this kind is always hazardous. We only throw the difficulty of explanation further back. At what point of the world's history was the morbid taste acquired? If none but tainted individuals are capable of homosexual feelings, how did these feelings first come into existence? On the supposition that neuropathy forms a necessary condition of abnormal instinct, is it generic neuropathy or a specific type of that disorder? If generic, can valid reasons be adduced for regarding nervous malady in any of its aspects (hysteria is the mother, insanity is the father) as the cause of so peculiarly differentiated an affection of the sexual appetite? If specific, that is, if the ancestors of the patient must have been afflicted with sexual inversion, in what way did they acquire it, supposing all untainted individuals to be incapable of the feeling?

At this moment of history there is probably no individual in Europe who has not inherited some portion of a neuropathic stain. If that be granted, everybody is liable to sexual inversion, and the principle of heredity becomes purely theoretical.

That sexual inversion may be and actually is transmitted, like any other quality, appears to be proved by the history of well-known families both in England and in Germany. That it is not unfrequently exhibited by persons who have a bad ancestral record, may be taken for demonstrated. In certain cases we are justified, then, in regarding it as the sign or concomitant of nervous maladies. But the evidence of ancient Greece or Rome, of what Burton calls the "sotadic races" at the present time, of European schools and prisons, ought to make us hesitate before we commit ourselves to Krafft-Ebing's theory that hereditary affliction is a necessary predisposing cause.[24]

In like manner, masturbation may be credited with certain cases of acquired homosexual feeling. Undoubtedly the instinct is occasionally evoked in some obscure way by the depraved habit of inordinate self-abuse. Yet the autobiographies of avowed Urnings do not corroborate the view that they were originally more addicted to onanism than normal males. Ulrichs has successfully combated the theory advanced by Tarnowsky, Prager, and Krafft-Ebing, if considered as a complete explanation of the problem.[25] On the other hand, common experience shows beyond all doubt, that young men between 16 and 20 give themselves up to daily self-abuse without weakening their appetite for women. They love boys and practice mutual self-abuse with persons of their own sex; yet they crave all the while for women. Of the many who live thus during the years of adolescence, some have undoubtedly as bad a family record as the worst of Krafft-Ebing's cases show. Finally, as regards the onanism which is a marked characteristic of some adult Urnings, this must be ascribed in most cases to the repression of their abnormal instincts. They adopt the habit, as Krafft-Ebing himself says, faute de mieux.[26]

In justice to the theory I am criticising, it ought to be remarked that Krafft-Ebing does not contend that wherever hereditary taint and onanism concur, the result will be sexual inversion; but rather that wherever we have diagnosed an acquired form of sexual inversion, we shall discover hereditary taint and onanism. Considering the frequency of both hereditary taint and onanism in our civilisation, this is not risking much. Those factors are discoverable in a large percentage of male persons. What seems unwarranted by facts is the suggestion that inherited neuropathy is an indispensable condition and the fundamental cause of homosexual instincts. The evidence of ancient Greece, schools, prisons, and sotadic races, compels us to believe that normally healthy people are often born with these instincts or else acquire them by the way of custom. Again, his insinuation that onanism, regarded as the main exciting cause, is more frequent among young people of abnormal inclinations than among their normal brethren, will not bear the test of common observation and of facts communicated in the autobiographies of professed onanists and confessed Urnings.

The problem is too delicate, too complicated, also too natural and simple, to be solved by hereditary disease and self-abuse. When we shift the ground of argument from acquired to inborn sexual inversion, its puzzling character will become still more apparent. We shall hardly be able to resist the conclusion that theories of disease are incompetent to explain the phenomenon in modern Europe. Medical writers abandon the phenomenon in savage races, in classical antiquity, and in the sotadic zone. They strive to isolate it as an abnormal and specifically morbid exception in our civilisation. But facts tend to show that it is a recurring impulse of humanity, natural to some people, adopted by others, and in the majority of cases compatible with an otherwise normal and healthy temperament.

Krafft-Ebing calls attention to the phenomenon of permanent effeminatio, in males unsexed by constant riding and the exhaustion of their virility by friction of the genitals—a phenomenon observed by Herodotus among Scythians, and prevalent among some nomadic races of the Caucasus at the present day.[27] He claims this in support of his theory of masturbation; and within due limits, he has the right to do so. The destruction of the male apparatus for reproduction, whether it be by castration after puberty, or by an accident to the parts, or by a lesion of the spine, or by excessive equitation, as appears proved from the history of nomad tribes, causes men to approximate physically to the female type, and to affect feminine occupations and habits. In proportion as the masculine functions are interfered with, masculine characteristics tend to disappear; and it is curious to notice that the same result is reached upon so many divers ways.

Next he discusses a few cases in which it seems that sexual inversion displays itself episodically under the conditions of a psychopathical disturbance.[28] That is to say, three persons, two women and one man, have been observed by him, under conditions approaching mental alienation, to exchange their normal sexual inclination for abnormal appetite. In the analysis of the problem these cases cannot be regarded as wholly insignificant. The details show that the subjects were clearly morbid. Therefore they have their value for the building up of a theory of sexual inversion upon the basis of inherited and active disease.

(B) Ultimately, Krafft-Ebing attacks the problem of what he calls "the innate morbid phenomenon" of sexual inversion.[29] While giving a general description of the subjects of this class, he remarks that the males display a pronounced sexual antipathy for women, and a strongly accentuated sympathy for men. Their reproductive organs are perfectly differentiated on the masculine type; but they desire men instinctively, and are inclined to express their bias by assuming characters of femininity. Women infected by a like inversion, exhibit corresponding anomalies.

Casper, continues Krafft-Ebing, thoroughly diagnosed the phenomenon. Griesinger referred it to hereditary affliction. Westphal defined it as "a congenital inversion of the sexual feeling, together with a consciousness of its morbidity." Ulrichs explained it by the presence of a feminine soul in a male body, and gave the name Urning[30] to its subjects. Gley suggested that a female brain was combined with masculine glands of sex. Magnan hypothesised a woman's brain in a man's body.

Krafft-Ebing asserts that hardly any of these Urnings are conscious of morbidity. They look upon themselves as unfortunate mainly because law and social prejudices stand in the way of their natural indulgence.[31] He also takes for proved, together with all the authorities he cites, that the abnormal sexual appetite is constitutional and inborn.

Krafft-Ebing, as might have been expected, refers the phenomenon to functional degeneration, dependent upon neuropathical conditions in the patient, which are mainly derived from hereditary affliction.

He confirms the account reported above from Casper as to the platonic or semi-platonic relations of the Urning with the men he likes, his abhorrence of coition, and his sexual gratification through acts of mutual embracement. The number of Urnings in the world, he says, is far greater than we can form the least conception of from present means of calculation.

At this point he begins to subdivide the subjects of congenital inversion. The first class he constitutes are called by him "Psychical Hermaphrodites." Born with a predominant inclination towards persons of their own sex, they possess rudimentary feelings of a semi-sexual nature for the opposite. These people not unfrequently marry; and Krafft-Ebing supposes that many cases of frigidity in matrimony, unhappy unions, and so forth, are attributable to the peculiar diathesis of the male—or it may be, of the female—in these marriages. They are distinguished from his previous class of "acquired" inversion by the fact that the latter start with instincts for the other sex, which are gradually obliterated; whereas the psychical hermaphrodites commence life with an attraction towards their own sex, which they attempt to overcome by making demands upon their rudimentary normal instincts. Five cases are given of such persons.[32]

In the next place he comes to true homosexual individuals, or Urnings in the strict sense of that phrase. With them there is no rudimentary appetite for the other sex apparent. They present a "grotesque" parallel to normal men and women, inverting or caricaturing natural appetites. The male of this class shrinks from the female, and the female from the male.[33] Each is vehemently attracted from earliest childhood to persons of the same sex. But they, in their turn, have to be subdivided into two sub-species. In the first of these, the sexual life alone is implicate; the persons who compose it do not differ in any marked or external characteristics from the type of their own sex; their habits and outward appearance remain unchanged. With the second sub-species the case is different. Here the character, the mental constitution, the habits, and the occupations of the subject have been altered by his or her predominant sexual inversion; so that a male addicts himself to a woman's work, assumes female clothes, acquires a shriller key of voice, and expresses the inversion of his sexual instinct in every act and gesture of his daily life.

It appears from Krafft-Ebing's recorded cases that the first of these sub-species yields nearly the largest number of individuals. He presents eleven detailed autobiographies of male Urnings, in whom the vita sexualis alone is abnormal, and who are differentiated to common observation from normal men by nothing but the nature of their amorous proclivities. The class includes powerfully developed masculine beings, who are unsexed in no particular except that they possess an inordinate appetite for males, and will not look at females.

As regards the family history of the eleven selected cases, five could show a clear bill of health, some were decidedly bad, a small minority were uncertain.

One of these Urnings, a physician, informed Krafft-Ebing that he had consorted with at least six hundred men of his own stamp; many of them in high positions of respectability. In none had he observed an abnormal formation of the sexual organs; but frequently some approximation to the feminine type of body—hair sparingly distributed[34], tender complexion, and high tone of voice. About ten per cent. eventually adopted love for women. Not ten per cent. exhibited any sign of the habitus muliebris in their occupations, dress, and so forth. A large majority felt like men in their relations to men, and were even inclined toward active pæderasty. From the unmentionable act they were deterred by æsthetical repulsion and fear of the law.

The second of these sub-species embraces the individuals with whom the reader of Carlier is familiar, and whom Ulrichs calls Weiblinge. In their boyhood they exhibited a marked disinclination for the games of their school-fellows, and preferred to consort with girls. They helped their mothers in the household, learned to sew and knit, caught at every opportunity of dressing up in female clothes. Later on, they began to call themselves by names of women, avoided the society of normal comrades, hated sport and physical exercise, were averse to smoking and drinking, could not whistle. Whether they refrained from swearing is not recorded. Many of them developed a taste for music, and prided themselves upon their culture. Eventually, when they became unclassed, they occupied themselves with toilette, scandal, tea, and talk about their lovers—dressed as far as possible in female clothes, painted, perfumed and curled their hair—addressed each other in the feminine gender, adopted pseudonyms of Countess or of Princess, and lived the life of women of a dubious demi-monde.[35]

Yet they remained in their physical configuration males. Unlike the preceding sub-species, they did not feel as men feel towards their sweethearts, but on the contrary like women. They had no impulse toward active pæderasty, no inclination for blooming adolescents. What they wanted was a robust adult; and to him they submitted themselves with self-abandonment. Like all Urnings, they shrank from the act of coition for the most part, and preferred embracements which produced a brief and pleasurable orgasm. But some developed a peculiar liking for the passive act of sodomy or the anomalous act of fellatio.

In this characterisation I have overpassed the limits of the fifteen cases presented by Krafft-Ebing. In order to constitute the type, I have drawn upon one reliable, because sympathetic, source in Ulrichs, and on another reliable, because antipathetic, source in Carlier.

Sexual inversion, in persons of the third main species, has reached its final development. Descending, if we follow Krafft-Ebing's categories, from acquired to innate inversion, dividing the latter into psychopathic hermaphrodites and Urnings, subdividing Urnings into those who retain their masculine habit and those who develop a habit analogous to that of females, we come in this last class to the most striking phenomenon of inverted sex. Here the soul which is doomed to love a man, and is nevertheless imprisoned in a male body, strives to convert that body to feminine uses so entirely that the marks of sex, except in the determined organs of sex, shall be obliterated. And sometimes it appears that the singular operation of nature, with which we are occupied in this Essay, goes even further. The inverted bias given to the sexual appetite, as part of the spiritual nature of the man, can never quite transmute male organs into female organs of procreation. But it modifies the bony structure of the body, the form of the face, the fleshly and muscular integuments to such an obvious extent that Krafft-Ebing thinks himself justified in placing a separate class of androgynous beings (with their gynandrous correspondents) at the end of the extraordinary process.

At this point it will be well to present a scheme of his analysis under the form of a table.

Sexual Inversion Acquired Persistent. Episodical.

Psychopathic Hemaphrodites.

CongenitalUrningsMale Habitus (Mannlinge). Female Habitus (Weiblinge).

Androgyni.

What is the rational explanation of the facts presented to us by the analysis which I have formulated in this table cannot as yet be thoroughly determined. We do not know enough about the law of sex in human beings to advance a theory. Krafft-Ebing and writers of his school are at present inclined to refer them all to diseases of the nervous centres, inherited, congenital, excited by early habits of self-abuse. The inadequacy of this method I have already attempted to set forth; and I have also called attention to the fact that it does not sufficiently account for phenomena known to us through history and through every-day experience.

Presently we shall be introduced to a theory (that of Ulrichs) which is based upon a somewhat grotesque and metaphysical conception of nature, and which dispenses with the hypothesis of hereditary disease. I am not sure whether this theory, unsound as it may seem to medical specialists, does not square better with ascertained facts than that of inherited disorder in the nervous centres.

However that may be, the physicians, as represented by Krafft-Ebing, absolve all subjects of inverted sexuality from crime. They represent them to us as the subjects of ancestral malady. And this alters their position face to face with vulgar error, theological rancour, and the stringent indifference of legislators. A strong claim has been advanced for their treatment henceforth, not as delinquents, but as subjects of congenital depravity in the brain centres, over which they have no adequate control.

The fourth medical author, with whom we are about to be occupied, includes sexual inversion in his general survey of human crime, and connects it less with anomalies of the nervous centres than with atavistic reversion to the state of nature and savagery. In the end, it will be seen, he accepts a concordat with the hypothesis of "moral insanity."

Cesare Lombroso. "Der Verbrecher in Anthropologischer, Aerztlicher und Juristischer Beziehung."

This famous book, which has contributed no little to a revolution of opinion regarding crime and its punishment in Italy, contains a searching inquiry into the psychological nature, physical peculiarities, habits, and previous history of criminals.[36] It is, in fact, a study of the criminal temperament. Lombroso deals in the main, as is natural, with murder, theft, rape, cruelty, and their allied species. But he includes sexual inversion in the category of crimes, and regards the abnormal appetites as signs of that morbid condition into which he eventually revolves the criminal impulse.

Wishing to base his doctrine on a sound foundation, Lombroso begins with what may be termed the embryology of crime. He finds unnatural vices frequent among horses, donkeys, cattle, insects, fowls, dogs, ants. The phenomenon, he says, is usually observable in cases where the male animal has been excluded from intercourse with females. Having established his general position that what we call crimes of violence, robbery, murder, cruelty, blood-thirst, cannibalism, unnatural lust, and so forth, exist among the brutes—in fact, that most of these crimes form the rule and not the exception in their lives—he passes on to the consideration of the savage man. In following his analysis, I shall confine myself to what he says about abnormal sexual passion.

He points out that in New Caledonia the male savages meet together at night in huts for the purpose of promiscuous intercourse (p. 42). The same occurs in Tahiti, where the practice is placed under the protection of a god. Next he alludes to the ancient Mexicans; and then proceeds to Hellas and Rome, where this phase of savage immorality survived and became a recognised factor in social life (p. 43). At Rome, he says, the Venus of the sodomites received the title of Castina (p. 38).

Lombroso's treatment of sexual inversion regarded as a survival from prehistoric times is by no means exhaustive. It might be supplemented and confirmed by what we know about the manners of the Kelts, as reported by Aristotle (Pol. ii. 6. 5.)—Tartars, Persians, Afghans, North American Indians, &c. Diodorus Siculus, writing upon the morals of the Gauls, deserves attention in this respect.[37] It is also singular to find that the Norman marauders of the tenth century carried unnatural vices wherever they appeared in Europe.[38] The Abbot of Clairvaux, as quoted by Lombroso (p. 43), accused them of spreading their brutal habits through society. People accustomed to look upon these vices as a form of corruption in great cities will perhaps be surprised to find them prevalent among nomadic and warlike tribes. But, in addition to survival from half-savage periods of social life, the necessities of warriors thrown together with an insufficiency of women must be considered. I have already suggested that Greek love grew into a custom during the Dorian migration and the conquest of Crete and Peloponnesus by bands of soldiers.

Cannibalism, Lombroso points out (p. 68), originated in necessity, became consecrated by religion, and finally remained as custom and a form of gluttony. The same process of reasoning, when applied to sexual aberrations, helps us to understand how a non-ethical habit, based on scarcity of women, survived as a social and chivalrous institution among the civilised Hellenes.

Lombroso traces the growth of justice in criminal affairs, and the establishment of pains and penalties, up to the instinct of revenge and the despotic selfishness of chiefs in whom the whole property of savage tribes, including women, was vested. This section of his work concludes with the following remarkable sentence (p. 96): "The universal diffusion of crime which we have demonstrated at a certain remote epoch, and its gradual disappearance as a consequence of new crimes springing up, traces of which are still discoverable in our penal codes [he means revenge, the egotism of princes, and ecclesiastical rapacity], are calculated even more than the criminality of brutes to make us doubt of what metaphysicians call eternal justice, and indicate the real cause of the perpetual reappearance of crime among civilised races, namely atavism."

Having established this principle, Lombroso proceeds to trace the atavism of criminality in children. He shows that just as the human embryo passes through all forms of lower lives, so men and women in their infancy exactly reproduce the moral type of savages. Ungovernable rage, revengeful instincts, jealousy, envy, lying, stealing, cruelty, laziness, vanity, sexual proclivities, imperfect family affections, a general bluntness of the ethical sense, are common qualities of children, which the parent and the teacher strive to control or to eradicate by training. "The child, considered as a human being devoid of moral sense, presents a perfect picture of what doctors call moral insanity, and I prefer to classify as inborn crime" (p. 97). "All species of anomalous sexual appetite, with the exception of those dependent upon senile decadence, make their appearance in childhood, together with the other criminal tendencies" (p. 117).

Lombroso arrives, then, at the conclusion that what civilised humanity calls crime and punishes, is the law of nature in brutes, persists as a normal condition among savages, and displays itself in the habits and instincts of children. The moral instinct is therefore slowly elaborated out of crime in the course of generations by whole races, and in the course of infancy and adolescence in the individual. The habitual criminal, who remains a criminal in his maturity, in whom crime is inborn and ineradicable, who cannot develop a moral sense, he explains at first by atavism. A large section of his volume (pp. 124-136, 137-253) is devoted to anthropometrical observations upon the physical structure, the cranial and cerebral development, and the physiognomy of such criminals. Into this part of his work we need not enter. Nor is it necessary to follow his interesting researches in the biology and psychology of "born criminals"—chapters on tattooing, ways of thinking and feeling, passions, tendencies to suicide, religious sentiment, intelligence and culture, capacity of self-control, liability to relapse, and so forth. Many curious facts relating to sexual inversion are treated in the course of these enquiries; and one passage describing the general characteristics of pæderasts (p. 376) ought to be alluded to. Considering this subject solely as a phase of crime, Lombroso reveals a superficial conception of its perplexity.

It is more important to reflect upon his theory of crime in general. Having started with the hypothesis of atavism, and adopted the term "born criminal," he later on identifies "innate crime" with "moral insanity," and illustrates both by the phenomena of epilepsy.[39] This introduces a certain confusion and incoherence into his speculative system; for he frankly admits that he has only gradually and tardily been led to recognise the identity of what is called crime and what is called moral insanity. Criminal atavism might be defined as the sporadic reversion to savagery in certain individuals. It has nothing logically to connect it with distortion or disease—unless we assume that all our savage ancestors were malformed or diseased, and that the Greeks, in whom one form of Lombroso's criminal atavism became established, were as a nation morally insane. The appearance of structural defects in habitual criminals points less to atavistic reversion than to radical divergence from the normal type of humanity. In like manner the invocation of heredity as a principle (p. 135) involves a similar confusion. Hereditary taint is a thing different not in degree but in kind from savage atavism prolonged from childhood into manhood.

Be this as it may, whether we regard offenders against law and ethic as "born criminals," or as "morally insane," or whether we transcend the distinction implied in these two terms, Lombroso maintains that there is no good in trying to deal with them by punishment. They ought to be treated with life-long sequestration in asylums (p. 135), and rigidly forbidden to perpetuate the species. That is the conclusion to which the whole of his long argument is carried. He contends that the prevalent juristic conception of crime rests upon ignorance of nature, brute-life, savagery, and the gradual emergence of morality. So radical a revolution in ideas, which gives new meaning to the words sin and conscience, which removes moral responsibility, and which substitutes the anthropologist and the physician for the judge and jury, cannot be carried out, even by its fervent apostle, without some want of severe logic. Thus we find Lombroso frequently drawing distinctions between "habitual" or "born" criminals and what he calls "occasional" criminals, without explaining the phenomenon of "occasional crime," and saying how he thinks this ought to be regarded by society. Moreover, he almost wholly ignores the possibility of correcting criminal tendencies by appeal to reason, by establishing habits of self-restraint, and by the employment of such means as hypnotic suggestion.[40] Yet experience and the common practice of the world prove that these remedies are not wholly inefficacious; and indeed the passage from childish savagery to moralised manhood, on which he lays so great a stress, is daily effected by the employment of such measures in combination with the fear of punishment and the desire to win esteem.

The final word upon Lombroso's book is this: Having started with the natural history of crime, as a prime constituent in nature and humanity, which only becomes crime through the development of social morality, and which survives atavistically in persons ill adapted to their civilised environment, he suddenly turns round and identifies the crime thus analysed with morbid nerve-conditions, malformations and moral insanity. Logically, it is impossible to effect this coalition of two radically different conceptions. If crime was not crime but nature in the earlier stages, and only appeared as crime under the conditions of advancing culture, its manifestation as a survival in certain individuals ought to be referred to nature, and cannot be relegated to the category of physical or mental disease. Savages are savages, but not lunatics or epileptics.

NOTE TO THE FOREGOING SECTION.

At the close of this enquiry into medical theories of sexual inversion, all of which assume that the phenomenon is morbid, it may not be superfluous to append the protest of an Urning against that solution of the problem. I translate it from the original document published by Krafft-Ebing (pp. 216-219). He says that the writer is "a man of high position in London"; but whether the communication was made in German or in English, does not appear.

"You have no conception what sustained and difficult struggles we all of us (the thoughtful and refined among us most of all) have to carry on, and how terribly we are forced to suffer under the false opinions which still prevail regarding us and our so-called immorality.

"Your view that, in most cases, the phenomenon in question has to be ascribed to congenital morbidity, offers perhaps the easiest way of overcoming popular prejudices, and awakening sympathy instead of horror and contempt for us poor 'afflicted' creatures.

"Still, while I believe that this view is the most favourable for us in the present state of things, I am unable in the interest of science to accept the term morbid without qualification, and venture to suggest some further distinctions bearing on the central difficulties of the problem.

"The phenomenon is certainly anomalous; but the term morbid carries a meaning which seems to me inapplicable to the subject, or at all events to very many cases which have come under my cognisance. I will concede à priori that a far larger proportion of mental disturbance, nervous hyper-sensibility, &c., can be proved in Urnings than in normal men. But ought this excess of nervous erethism to be referred necessarily to the peculiar nature of the Urning? Is not this the true explanation, in a vast majority of cases, that the Urning, owing to present laws and social prejudices, cannot like other men obtain a simple and easy satisfaction of his inborn sexual desires?

"To begin with the years of boyhood: an Urning, when he first becomes aware of sexual stirrings in his nature, and innocently speaks about them to his comrades, soon finds that he is unintelligible. So he wraps himself within his own thoughts. Or should he attempt to tell a teacher or his parents about these feelings, the inclination, which for him is as natural as swimming to a fish, will be treated by them as corrupt and sinful; he is exhorted at any cost to overcome and trample on it. Then there begins in him a hidden conflict, a forcible suppression of the sexual impulse; and in proportion as the natural satisfaction of his craving is denied, fancy works with still more lively efforts, conjuring up those seductive pictures which he would fain expel from his imagination. The more energetic is the youth who has to fight this inner battle, the more seriously must his whole nervous system suffer from it. It is this forcible suppression of an instinct so deeply rooted in our nature, it is this, in my humble opinion, which first originates the morbid symptoms, that may often be observed in Urnings. But such consequences have nothing in themselves to do with the sexual inversion proper to the Urning.

"Well then; some persons prolong this never-ending inner conflict, and ruin their constitutions in course of time; others arrive eventually at the conviction that an inborn impulse, which exists in them so powerfully, cannot possibly be sinful—so they abandon the impossible task of suppressing it. But just at this point begins in real earnest the Iliad of their sufferings and constant nervous excitations. The normal man, if he looks for means to satisfy his sexual inclinations, knows always where to find that without trouble. Not so the Urning. He sees the men who attract him; he dares not utter, nay, dares not even let it be perceived, what stirs him. He imagines that he alone of all the people in the world is the subject of emotions so eccentric. Naturally, he cultivates the society of young men, but does not venture to confide in them. So at last he is driven to seek some relief in himself, some makeshift for the satisfaction he cannot obtain. This results in masturbation, probably excessive, with its usual pernicious consequences to health. When, after the lapse of a certain time, his nervous system is gravely compromised, this morbid phenomenon ought not to be ascribed to sexual inversion in itself; far rather we have to regard it as the logical issue of the Urning's position, driven as he is by dominant opinion to forego the gratification which for him is natural and normal, and to betake himself to onanism.