nd, Prussia, &c., might indeed reply: "This is opening a free way
to the seduction and corruption of young men." But young men are surely
at least as capable of defending themselves against seduction and
corruption as young women are. Nay, they are far more able, not merely
because they are stronger, but because they are not usually weakened by
an overpowering sexual instinct on which the seducer plays. Yet the
seduction and corruption of young women is tolerated, in spite of the
attendant consequences of illegitimate childbirth, and all which that
involves. This toleration of the seduction of women by men springs from
the assumption that only the normal sexual appetite is natural. The
seduction of a man by a male passes for criminal, because the inverted
sexual instinct is regarded as unnatural, depraved, and wilfully
perverse. On the hypothesis that individuals subject to perverted
instincts can suppress them at pleasure or convert them into normal
appetite, it is argued that they must be punished. But when the real
facts come to be studied, it will be found: first, that these instincts
are inborn in Urnings, and are therefore in their case natural;
secondly, that the suppression of them is tantamount to life-long
abstinence under the constant torture of sexual solicitation; thirdly,
that the conversion of them into normal channels is in a large
percentage of cases totally impossible, in nearly all where it has been
attempted is only partially successful, and where marriage ensues has
generally ended in misery for both parties. Ulrichs, it will be noticed,
does not distinguish between Urnings, in whom the inversion is admitted
to be congenital, and Uraniasters, in whom it has been acquired or
deliberately adopted. And it would be very difficult to frame laws which
should take cognisance of these two classes. The Code Napoleon
legalises the position of both, theoretically at any rate. The English
code treats both as criminal, doing thereby, it must be admitted, marked
injustice to recognised Urnings, who at the worst are morbid or insane,
or sexually deformed, through no fault of their own.

In the present state of things, adds Ulrichs, the men who yield their
bodies to abnormal lovers, do not merely do so out of compliance,
sympathy, or the desire for reasonable reward. Too often they speculate
upon the illegality of the connection, and have their main object in the
extortion of money by threats of exposure. Thus the v