The Scented Garden

33 bring home these things, don’t you know ? But we think what we think, don’t you know ? While your admiring friends openly boast of you as a dam clever bugger, by God ! He had half the boys in London, and when they started to black- mail him, he turned right round like that (gesture) before you could say “ knife ”, by God ! and didn’t they get beans, by God ! But could I fight an English election ? How would my chiefs in the army look at it, when it came to the actual point of choosing one of two men for promotion ? What price that fat tutor- ship ? There are dozens of weak innocent fools in Lon- don at this hour who, making these reflections, paid the first fatal moderate demand. There are dozens of strong-minded men who have come to the conclusion that they may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, especially as the former is real, and the latter imaginary, and so a posteriori turned their thoughts ad posteriorem. Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them : the Urning, the Bimetallist, and the carcerophobe. There are some sodomites which were so born from their mother’s womb : and there are some sodomites, which were made sodomites of men : and there are sodomites, which have made them- selves sodomites for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake. (The Urning, the Bimetallist and the carcerophobe, and the holy sodomite to whom his passion is a sacrament, leading him on the straight road into the very arms of God). He that is able to receive it, let him receive it ! The law manufactures sodomites as it manufac- tures habitual criminals. Legalize sodomy, and you will diminish it ; or even if, as you seem to fear, you increase it, you will see no change in society but an advance in re-