Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/474

 When the Code-Napoléon was evolved by France, with the Revolutionary instincts strong as to each question of individual rights, the French opposition to including references to homosexuality, if not in outrage against public good morals and innocent youth, was especially because of the dangers of increasing crime by such a paragraph; of causing scandals of uselessly humiliating social sort; of prompting espionage in private life—all recognized evils. The Napoleonic and the Post-Revolutionary legal mind stood, out against it; along with other deterrents. Before the consolidation of the present General Code for Imperial Germany, crimes, menaces and scandals referring to homosexual incidents were met mostly in those parts of Germany where the older law-systems existed. One might almost say that compared with the shocking frequency of blackmailings and murders to-day in the Reich, they "did not exist", until the present "Paragraph 175" became the law of the land. When this same paragraph was discussed, with the unification of German laws, such eminent jurists, working at the Code, as Virchow, Hofmann and Langenbeck most positively opposed such a law as a mischievous, socially pernicious paragraph. The sentiment of distinguished criminalists, of police-judges, of Councils of Public Hygiene and Safety, have since then urged its removal, as in every interest a law desirable to be dropped. But, so far, such opinions, not to mention the general petitionary movements against the paragraph in Germany, have been vain.

Blackmail is of course of the essence of espionage; of vicious leverage against the individual's peace, against his social protection. It is often the most impudent of attacks. For success it requires some cleverness, some moral (or immoral} boldness, and not seldom physical courage; especially if the blackmailer must arrive at not only extortion but at robbery and murder, as finale. It is the constant