strictly
speaking, are, nevertheless, mental deformities, and their unfortunate
victims are dwellers in the borderlands. Mild forms of these types of
degeneration are very abundant. The effeminate, cigarette-smoking,
soda-drinking young man of the comic weeklies, and the loud, horsy,
slang-using, vulgar, masculine young woman are seen everywhere.

Effemination and viraginity are the results of the weakening effects of
luxury and consequent debauchery. Nations, time and again, have felt the
dire effects of effemination and have sunk beneath them. The Grecian,
the Roman, the Egyptian nations are familiar examples. The satirists of
the golden age of the Latin people dipped their _stili_, metaphorically,
in gall and bitter wormwood and berated the effeminate nobility time and
again. One of them advised the Roman ladies to look for _men_ among the
gladiators and the peasants! Anacreon's poems are filled with allusions
to effemination and the delights of psychic hermaphroditism.

In the time of Louis XIV., of France, the royal palaces were filled to
repletion with effeminants, who vied with the women in the splendor of
their robes and the salacious eccentricities of their conduct. The case
of Alice Mitchell, who killed Freda Ward in Memphis not long ago, was
one of pronounced viraginity.

Fortunately, for the good of the community at large, there are,
comparatively speaking, few viragints. The careful mother restrains,
tempers, and abolishes the hoydenish habits of her "tom-boy" girl early
in life, and turns her thoughts toward feminine pursuits and desires.
The unfortunate effeminant, however, is encouraged in his feminine
tastes and habits by his unwise mother, who likes her boy to sit beside
her and sew and knit, if he so desires. She discusses matters of the
toilet with him, and, in fact, treats him as she would a daughter. In
the end, his psychic hermaphroditism becomes complete, and one more
unfortunate goes out into the world to swell the ranks of crankdom!

Kleptomaniacs are greatly to be pitied, for they are generally women in
whom the moral sense is very much developed. The victim of kleptomania
will steal any and everything; they are like magpies in this respect. An
acquaintance of mine, a most estimable lady, a devout Christian, and a
most exemplary wife and mother, is the most incorrigible thief I ever
saw. She has often picked my pockets while I was engaged about her
sick-bed. The merchants of the city where