Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/82

 With the advance of the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Centuries, we begin to find the philosophers, the legislators and even the clergy beginning to question, in print and otherwise, the real nature and moral weight of similisexual love. 'Is so rooted a human instinct, a natural-moral sin?' Broad-minded jurists began to discuss what had been supposed to be out of any argument. The great theorist Beccaria boldly, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, put himself into a conservative, tolerant attitude toward the passion. So did certain others. The Eighteenth Century, with its many new currents of intellectual and moral thought continued the conservatism. It required courage; but that was shown, in spite of scandalized rebukes by both Protestant and Catholic clergy. Voltaire, so much of whose influence we recognize today as admirably humanitarian, regarded similisexual love as an eccentricity of Nature, originating in deep psychic mystery, and opposed classing it with crimes. Beccaria had desired that the similisexualist should be given opportunity to amend his moral education. Ideas advanced. By the end of the Eighteenth Century, the European laws laying down a death-penalty for sexual intercourse between men were largely a dead letter. There was no direct social toleration of the passion, no religious sufferance of a ground for tolerating it. But it met only imprisonment, loss of civic rights, fines and banishments and so on. Homosexuality was considered abject disgrace, but not felony. Nevertheless, in few European statute-books was its extreme punishment distinctly modified. The penalties were not enforced, the statute was allowed to rust. Even to-day, this is the fact in some States of first-class importance.

About the middle of the century that is just past as this study is completed, the specialists attention of the European