But it is quite otherwise today in a country like England or the United States.[103] In these countries all our traditions and all our moral ideals, as well as the law, are energetically opposed to every manifestation of homosexual passion.  It requires a very strong impetus to go against this compact social force which, on every side, constrains the individual into the paths of heterosexual love.  That impetus, in a well-bred individual who leads the normal life of his fellow-men and who feels the ordinary degree of respect for the social feeling surrounding him, can only be supplied by a fundamental—­usually, it is probable, inborn—­perversion of the sexual instinct, rendering the individual organically abnormal.  It is with this fundamental abnormality, usually called sexual inversion, that we shall here be concerned.  There is no evidence to show that homosexuality in Greece was a congenital perversion, although it appears that Coelius Aurelianus affirms that in the opinion of Parmenides it was hereditary.  Aristotle also, in his fragment on physical love, though treating the whole matter with indulgence, seems to have distinguished abnormal congenital homosexuality from acquired homosexual vice.  Doubtless in a certain proportion of cases the impulse was organic, and it may well be that there was an organic and racial predisposition to homosexuality among the Greeks, or, at all events, the Dorians.  But the state of social feeling, however it originated, induced a large proportion of the ordinary population to adopt homosexuality as a fashion, or, it may be said, the environment was peculiarly favorable to the development of latent homosexual tendencies.  So that any given number of homosexual persons among the Greeks would have presented a far smaller proportion of constitutionally abnormal individuals than a like number in England.  In a similar manner—­though I do not regard the analogy as complete—­infanticide or the exposition of children was practised in some of the early Greek States by parents who were completely healthy and normal; in England a married woman who destroys her child is in nearly every case demonstrably diseased or abnormal.  For this reason I am unable to see that homosexuality in ancient Greece—­while of great interest as a social and psychological problem—­throws light on sexual inversion as we know it in England or the United States.

Concerning the wide prevalence of sexual inversion and of homosexual phenomena generally, there can be no manner of doubt.  This question has been most fully investigated in Germany.  In Berlin, Moll states that he has himself seen between 600 and 700 homosexual persons and heard of some 250 to 350 others.  Hirschfeld states that he has known over 10,000 homosexual persons.