Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/258

 Komitee, in Berlin, has lately put in its table of statistical estimates, an average of five per cent of the German aristocracy as being homosexuals; two persons in each forty. The army-percentage must also be considered. (See other chapters.)

Particularizing Germany, the newest "Berlin Scandals" as they have been called (for which there is room for only a few lines in this book) are showing how German homosexualism wears the broad-striped toga; approaches the throne now as ever; is perhaps even more contemporaneously born in the purple than might prudently be admitted. The "Harden Cases," and their immediate successors, which have not spared even an Imperial Chancellor ( though in his instance there was no obvious personal foundation for the suggestion—repudiated as a libel) have been of indirect as well as direct bearings. There can be little doubt that the Schulenburg, Moltke, Eulenburg, Hohenau and Lynar cases, as others, have been got out of nervous public attention as quickly as possible, to avoid compromising hundreds of aristocratic similisexuals in Germanic territory. The notorious scandals before Berlin aristocracy, in 1903 known as the "Affair of the Lakes", in which a clique of young scions and old ones, mostly rich and titled residents along the beautiful shores of the Müggelsee, were in the habit of quitting their villas at night, and sailing around the lake, naked but not at all ashamed, their boats wreathed in garlands, lighted with torches and lanterns—amid orgies of the sort described by Tacitus, more or less imitated—were distinguished for nobly-born participators. The need of interrupting these proceedings without making too great an aristocratic scandal gave the Berlin courts much trouble. Matters were compromised after the most unavoidable arrests, and by fines and hints to self-exile.