ery basest of all
trades, that of _chantage_, is encouraged by the law. Alter the law, and
instead of increasing vice, you will diminish it; for a man who should
then meet the advances of an Urning, would do so out of compliance, or,
as is the case with female prostitutes, upon the expectation of a
reasonable gain. The temptation to ply a disgraceful profession with the
object of extorting money would be removed. Moreover, as regards
individuals alike abnormally constituted, voluntary and mutually
satisfying relations, free from degrading risks, and possibly permanent,
might be formed between responsible agents. Finally, if it be feared
that the removal of legal disabilities would turn the whole male
population into Urnings, consider whether London is now so much purer in
this respect than Paris?

One serious objection to recognising and tolerating sexual inversion has
always been that it tends to check the population. This was a sound
political and social argument in the time of Moses, when a small and
militant tribe needed to multiply to the full extent of its procreative
capacity. It is by no means so valid in our age, when the habitable
portions of the globe are rapidly becoming overcrowded.[62] Moreover, we
must bear in mind that society, under the existing order, sanctions
female prostitution, whereby men and women, the normally procreative,
are sterilised to an indefinite extent. Logic, in these circumstances,
renders it equitable and ridiculous to deny a sterile exercise of sex to
abnormal men and women, who are by instinct and congenital diathesis
non-procreative.

As the result of these considerations, Ulrichs concludes that there is
no real ground for the persecution of Urnings except as may be found in
the repugnance by the vast numerical majority for an insignificant
minority. The majority encourages matrimony, condones seduction,
sanctions prostitution, legalises divorce in the interests of its own
sexual proclivities. It makes temporary or permanent unions illegal for
the minority whose inversion of instinct it abhors. And this
persecution, in the popular mind at any rate, is justified, like many
other inequitable acts of prejudice or ignorance, by theological
assumptions and the so-called mandates of revelation.

In the next place it is objected that inversed sexuality is demoralising
to the manhood of a nation, that it degrades the dignity of a man, and
that it is incapable of moral elevation. Each o