dmit that innovators have done the greatest service to
society. But you have not proved that you are working for the salvation
of humanity at large. Would it not be better to remain quiet, and to
sacrifice your life and joy, the life and joy of an avowed minority, for
the sake of the immense majority who cannot tolerate you, and who dread
your innovation? The Catholic priesthood is vowed to celibacy; and
unquestionably there are some adult men in that order who have trampled
out the imperious appetite of the male for the female. What they do for
the sake of their vow will not you accomplish, when you have so much of
good to gain, of evil to escape?" What good, what evil? rejoins Ulrichs.
You are again begging the question; and now you are making appeals to my
selfishness, my personal desire for tranquillity, my wish to avoid
persecution and shame. I have taken no vow of celibacy. If I have taken
any vow at all, it is to fight for the rights of an innocent, harmless,
downtrodden group of outraged personalities. The cross of a Crusade is
sewn upon the sleeve of my right arm. To expect from me and from my
fellows the renouncement voluntarily undertaken by a Catholic priest is
an absurdity, when we join no order, have no faith to uphold, no
ecclesiastical system to support. We maintain that we have the right to
exist after the fashion in which nature made us. And if we cannot alter
your laws, we shall go on breaking them. You may condemn us to infamy,
exile, prison--as you formerly burned witches. You may degrade our
emotional instincts and drive us into vice and misery. But you will not
eradicate inverted sexuality. Expel nature with a fork, and you know
what happens. "That is enough," says the objector: "We had better close
this conversation. I am sorry for you, sorry that you will not yield to
sense and force. The Urning must be punished."

VIII.

LITERATURE--IDEALISTIC.

To speak of Walt Whitman at all in connection with Ulrichs and sexual
inversion seems paradoxical. At the outset it must be definitely stated
that he has nothing to do with anomalous, abnormal, vicious, or diseased
forms of the emotion which males entertain for males. Yet no man in the
modern world has expressed so strong a conviction that "manly
attachment," "athletic love," "the high towering love of comrades," is a
main factor in human life, a virtue upon which society will have to
rest, and a passion equal in its permanence and intensity t