nature.

Social feeling, moulded by religion, by legislation, by civility, and by
the persistent antipathies of the majority regards sexual inversion with
immitigable abhorrence. It does not distinguish between the categories I
have indicated, but includes all species under the common condemnation
of crime.

Meanwhile, of late years, we have come to perceive that the phenomena
presented by sexual inversion, cannot be so roughly dealt with. Two
great nations, the French and the Italian, by the "Code Napoleon" and
the "Codice Penale" of 1889, remove these phenomena from the category of
crime into that of immorality at worst. That is to say, they place the
intercourse of males with males upon the same legal ground as the normal
sexual relation. They punish violence, protect minors, and provide for
the maintenance of public decency. Within these limitations, they
recognise the right of adults to deal as they choose with their persons.

The new school of anthropologists and psychological physicians study
sexual inversion partly on the lines of historical evolution, and partly
from the point of view of disease. Mixing up atavism and heredity with
nervous malady in the individual, they wish to substitute medical
treatment for punishment, life-long sequestration in asylums for terms
of imprisonment differing in duration according to the offence.

Neither society nor science entertains the notion that those instincts
which the laws of France and Italy tolerate, under certain restrictions,
can be simply natural in a certain percentage of male persons. Up to the
present time the Urning has not been considered as a sport of nature in
her attempt to differentiate the sexes. Ulrichs is the only European
who has maintained this view in a long series of polemical and
imperfectly scientific works. Yet facts brought daily beneath the notice
of open-eyed observers prove that Ulrichs is justified in his main
contention. Society lies under the spell of ancient terrorism and
coagulated errors. Science is either wilfully hypocritical or radically
misinformed.

Walt Whitman, in America, regards what he calls "manly love" as destined
to be a leading virtue of democratic nations, and the source of a new
chivalry. But he does not define what he means by "manly love." And he
emphatically disavows any "morbid inferences" from his doctrine as
"damnable."

This is how the matter stands now. The one thing which seems clear is
that sexual inver