ave not the unhappy constitution of the Urning. Cease to persecute
Urnings, accept them as inconsiderable, yet real, factors, in the social
commonwealth, leave them to themselves, and you will not be the worse
for it, and will also not carry on your conscience the burden of
intolerant vindictiveness.

Substantiating this position, Ulrichs demonstrates that acquired habits
of sexual inversion are almost invariably thrown off by normal natures.
Your boys at public schools, he says, behave as though they were
Urnings. In the lack of women, at the time when their passions are
predominant, they yield themselves up together to mutual indulgences
which would bring your laws down with terrible effect upon adults. You
are aware of this. You send your sons to Eton and to Harrow, and you
know very well what goes on there. Yet you remain untroubled in your
minds. And why? Because you feel convinced that they will return to
their congenital instincts.

When the school, the barrack, the prison, the ship has been abandoned,
the male reverts to the female. This is the truth about Dionings. The
large majority of men and women remain normal, simply because they were
made normal. They cannot find the satisfaction of their nature in those
inverted practices to which they yielded for a time through want of
normal outlet. Society risks little by the occasional caprice of the
school, the barrack, the prison, and the ship. Some genuine Urnings may,
indeed, discover their inborn inclination by means of the process to
which you subject them. But you are quite right in supposing that a
Dioning, though you have forced him to become for a time an Uraniaster,
will never in the long run appear as an Urning. The extensive experience
which English people possess regarding such matters, owing to the
notorious condition of their public schools, goes to confirm Ulrichs'
position. Headmasters know how many Uraniasters they have dealt with,
what excellent Dionings they become, and how comparatively rare, and yet
how incorrigibly steadfast, are the genuine Urnings in their flock.

The upshot of this matter is that we are continually forcing our young
men into conditions under which, if sexual inversion were an acquired
attribute, it would become stereotyped in their natures. Yet it does not
do so. Provisionally, because they are shut off from girls, because they
find no other outlet for their sex at the moment of its most imperious
claims, they turn toward