Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/503

 disclosures to the nearest policeman. Where the Latin blackmailer has not the leverage of law or of public decorum, he will threaten public social opinion; especially if the stranger be English or American. The victim's name will be printed—will be telegraphed to his native town. In all such cases, the victim's stout personal resistance, or threats of calling up the nearest policeman, will nearly always get rid promptly of the blackmailer. A favourite trick of this blackmailer is an accusation to the victim of pederasty with an "innocent" minor youth. This is not always easy to rout off-hand.

In France and Italy, be it noted, if on a charge of debauching a minor the minor can be proved an habitual offender, the case breaks up. To scandals, whether with or without blackmailing aspects (usually with such) in in countries where the liberal Code-Napoléon is the basis of legislation as to similisexuality, many criminal cases are based oh the perversion of minor youth. To these processes belong the famous and tragic Krupp Affair (already referred-to here), along with the "Allers Case," which it rather eclisedeclipsed [sic], in Capri and Germany, in 1902. Its actual legal territory was Italian. The "Krupp Case", in which the victim was accused of pederastic offences with innocent minor lads, ultimately resolved itself, in essential aspects, to a carefully-planned scheme for extortion; the matter of "innocence" being more than vague when the youth typically concerned came into question. In the concurrent "Allers Case", the plan of concerted blackmail was discernible. The distinguished Munich painter was warned by one of his young models—it is said, by the son of the Capriote who brought the attack into form; and the artist fled Capri, in time to escape arrest. He was sentenced (as an absent defendant) in the Naples court, to imprisonment and a fine.

The same leverage against homosexuals has lately shown itself in the affair, in Home, of the well-known