Page:Symonds - A Problem in Modern Ethics.djvu/39

Rh "In the case of another class of men, upon the contrary, the taste for this vice has been acquired in life, and is the result of over-satiety with natural pleasures. People of this stamp sometimes indulge their gross appetites alternately with either sex. I once observed a man, after contracting a venereal disease with women, adopt pæderasty out of fear of another infection; but he was, it must be admitted, a weak-minded individual. In all the great towns of Europe the vice goes creeping around, unobserved by the uninitiated. It appears that there is no inhabited spot of the globe where it may not be discovered. I said, unobserved by the uninitiated, advisedly. In antiquity the members of the sect had their own means of mutual recognition. And at the present time, these men know each other at first sight; moreover, they are found everywhere, in every station of society, without a single exception. 'We recognise each other at once,' says the writer of a report which I shall communicate below: 'A mere glance of the eye suffices; and I have never been deceived. On the Rigi, at Palermo, in the Louvre, in the Highlands of Scotland, in Petersburg, on disembarking at the port of Barcelona, I have found people, never seen by me before, and whom I discriminated in a second.' Several men of this sort whom I have known (continues Casper) are certainly accustomed to dress and adorn themselves in a rather feminine way. Nevertheless, there are indisputable pæderasts, who present an entirely different aspect, some of them elderly and negligent in their attire, and people of the lower classes, distinguished by absolutely nothing in their exterior from other persons of the same rank."