y a disease which claims to be cured, and
can in many cases be cured."[54]

After perusing what physicians, historians, and anthropologists have to
say about sexual inversion, there is good reason for us to feel uneasy
as to the present condition of our laws. And yet it might be argued
that anomalous desires are not always maladies, not always congenital,
not always psychical passions. In some cases they must surely be vices
deliberately adopted out of lustfulness, wanton curiosity, and seeking
after sensual refinements. The difficult question still remains
then--how to repress vice, without acting unjustly toward the naturally
abnormal, the unfortunate, and the irresponsible.

I pass now to the polemical writings of a man who maintains that
homosexual passions, even in their vicious aspects, ought not to be
punished except in the same degree and under the same conditions as the
normal passions of the majority.

VII.

LITERATURE--POLEMICAL.

It can hardly be said that inverted sexuality received a serious and
sympathetic treatment until a German jurist, named Karl Heinrich
Ulrichs, began his long warfare against what he considered to be
prejudice and ignorance upon a topic of the greatest moment to himself.
A native of Hanover, and writing at first under the assumed name of Numa
Numantius, he kept pouring out a series of polemical, analytical,
theoretical, and apologetical pamphlets between the years 1864 and 1870.
The most important of these works is a lengthy and comprehensive Essay
entitled "Memnon. Die Geschlechtsnatur des mannliebenden Urnings. Eine
naturwissenschaftliche Darstellung. Schleiz, 1868." Memnon may be used
as the text-book of its author's theories; but it is also necessary to
study earlier and later treatises--Inclusa, Formatrix, Vindex, Ara Spei,
Gladius Furens, Incubus, Argonauticus, Prometheus, Araxes, Kritische
Pfeile--in order to obtain a complete knowledge of his opinions, and to
master the whole mass of information he has brought together.

The object of Ulrichs in these miscellaneous writings is twofold. He
seeks to establish a theory of sexual inversion upon the basis of
natural science, proving that abnormal instincts are inborn and healthy
in a considerable percentage of human beings; that they do not owe their
origin to bad habits of any kind, to hereditary disease, or to wilful
depravity; that they are incapable in the majority of cases of being
extirpated or converted into