I have known lives darkened by it, weakened by it, crushed out by it.  How long are the western moralists to maim and brand and persecute where they do not understand?”

The next case belongs to a totally different class from all the preceding histories.  These—­all British or American—­were obtained privately; they are not the inmates of prisons or of asylums, and in most cases they have never consulted a physician concerning their abnormal instincts.  They pass through life as ordinary, sometimes as honored, members of society.  The following case, which happens to be that of an American, is acquainted with both the prison and the lunatic asylum.  There are several points of interest in his history, and he illustrates the way in which sexual inversion can become a matter of medico-legal importance.  I think, however, that I am justified in believing that the proportion of sexually inverted persons who reach the police-court or the lunatic asylum is not much larger in proportion to the number of sexually inverted persons among us than it is among my cases.  For the documents on which I have founded the history of Guy Olmstead I am indebted to the kindness of Dr. Talbot, of Chicago, well known from his studies of abnormalities of the jaws and face, so often associated with nervous and mental abnormality.  He knew the man who addressed to him the letters from which I here quote:—­

HISTORY XXVI.—­On the twenty-eighth of March, 1894, at noon, in the open street in Chicago, Guy T. Olmstead fired a revolver at a letter-carrier named William L. Clifford.  He came up from behind, and deliberately fired four shots, the first entering Clifford’s loins, the other three penetrating the back of his head, so that the man fell and was supposed to be fatally wounded.  Olmstead made little attempt to escape, as a crowd rushed up with the usual cry of “Lynch him!” but waved his revolver, exclaiming:  “I’ll never be taken alive!” and when a police-officer disarmed him:  “Don’t take my gun; let me finish what I have to do.”  This was evidently an allusion, as will be seen later on, to an intention to destroy himself.  He eagerly entered the prison-van, however, to escape the threatening mob.

Olmstead, who was 30 years of age, was born near Danville, Ill., in which city he lived for many years.  Both parents were born in Illinois.  His father, some twenty years ago, shot and nearly killed a wealthy coal operator, induced to commit the crime, it is said, by a secret organization of a hundred prominent citizens to whom the victim had made himself obnoxious by bringing suits against them for trivial causes.  The victim became insane, but the criminal was never punished, and died a few years later at the age of 44.  This man had another son who was considered peculiar.

Guy Olmstead began to show signs of sexual perversity at the age of 12.  He was seduced (we are led to believe) by a man who occupied