f these points may be
taken separately. They are all of them at once and together contradicted
by the history of ancient Greece. There the most warlike sections of the
race, the Dorians of Crete and Sparta, and the Thebans, organised the
love of male for male because of the social and military advantages they
found in it. Their annals abound in eminent instances of heroic
enthusiasm, patriotic devotion, and high living, inspired by homosexual
passion. The fighting peoples of the world, Kelts in ancient story,
Normans, Turks, Afghans, Albanians, Tartars, have been distinguished by
the frequency among them of what popular prejudice regards as an
effeminate vice.

With regard to the dignity of man, is there, asks Ulrichs, anything more
degrading to humanity in sexual acts performed between male and male
than in similar acts performed between male and female. In a certain
sense all sex has an element of grossness which inspires repugnance. The
gods, says Swinburne,

"Have strewed one marriage-bed with tears and fire,
For extreme loathing and supreme desire."

It would not be easy to maintain that a curate begetting his fourteenth
baby on the body of a worn-out wife is a more elevating object of
mental contemplation than Harmodius in the embrace of Aristogeiton, or
that a young man sleeping with a prostitute picked up in the Haymarket
is cleaner than his brother sleeping with a soldier picked up in the
Park. Much of this talk about the dignity of man, says Ulrichs, proceeds
from a vulgar misconception as to the nature of inverted sexual desire.
People assume that Urnings seek their pleasure only or mainly in an act
of unmentionable indecency. The exact opposite, he assures them, is the
truth. The act in question is no commoner between men and men than it is
between men and women. Ulrichs, upon this point, may be suspected,
perhaps, as an untrustworthy witness. His testimony, however, is
confirmed by Krafft-Ebing, who, as we have seen, has studied sexual
inversion long and minutely from the point of view of psychical
pathology. "As regards the nature of their sexual gratification," he
writes, "it must be established at the outset that the majority of them
are contented with reciprocal embraces; the act commonly ascribed to
them they generally abhor as much as normal men do; and, inasmuch as
they always prefer adults, they are in no sense specially dangerous to
boys."[63] This author proceeds to draw a distinction