respect for the sabbath, and there is a very general wish that it should be kept as far as possible a day of rest and recreation. No doubt the concerts and lectures in question, patronized as they have been, principally by working men and small traders, who have very little time or inclination after a hard day's work for such recreation on week days, fulfil both those requirements. But some payment is necessary, for there are incidental expenses which must be met. The lecturer often must be paid, the caretaker always, and there are other incidental expenses which occur in such entertainments. But the main point would be that the entertainment should not be carried on as a commercial speculation for profit.

There should be no reason why the Act if amended on some such lines as the above should not meet with the approval of Parliament. It would undoubtedly be better if the Bill were brought in in the House of Commons, though it could hardly be expected that a Government with many measures to pass would take up a Bill which might, and, as a Government measure, probably would, excite a considerable amount of opposition. But an energetic private member should have but little difficulty if his proposed amendments of the law were moderate. That it would be a real service to the community at large to have the present vexatious restrictions on rational Sunday recreations removed, appears now to be the opinion of the majority of thoughtful people in this country.

A. A. STRONG.

R

V. THE LUNACY LAWS.

ECENT events in the Law Courts have brought prominently before the public the great necessity of efficiently supervising the administration of the Lunacy Laws of the Kingdom, and of safeguarding the liberty of the sane,

whilst providing for the care and maintenance of a not inconsiderable portion of our mentally afflicted fellow-subjects. The existence of various forms of madness has been generally admitted, and measures for relief have been many, though still inadequate for the beneficial amelioration of the sufferers.

The idea of the supernatural character of insanity long prevailed, and hence witchcraft and demoniac possession came to be recognized; thoughts of an unseen world, torture, and punishment, possessed of devils and the sequence of such imaginings necessarily led to a predisposition to insanity, and a susceptibility of mind to external impressions facilitated the readiness of reception of hallucinations. The ancients subjected insane persons to the most horrid torture, and it was not till the eighteenth century that their treatment was modified. The Greeks, it is said, devoted attention to the malady, but there does not appear to have been in existence throughout a long antiquity a special asylum for the insane. Gibbon, in the 37th chapter of the Decline and Fall, says in the sixth century an hospital was founded at Jerusalem for a small portion of the austere penitents who were deprived of their senses, but it is nowhere suggested that aught like a lunatic asylum was established before the fifteenth century. Lunatics were admitted into general hospitals, and cared for according to existing lights by being thrown into dungeons, and bound in chains, till the spectacle of maniacs hooted by crowds in the streets of a Spanish city so acted on the compassion of a Monk, that he founded the first asylum for the insane in the City of Valencia, and the example was followed in Sarragossa, in Seville, in Valladolid, and Toledo between the years A.D. 1425 and 1483, so that Spain has the honoured memory of being the first Christian country to adopt this particular form of charity.

An early statute of Edward II. intituled "Of the Prerogative of the King," declared the King's rights to the custody of idiots and lunatics, and certain persons called Tutores had

the management of their lands; but, as might have been anticipated, these Tutores abused their trust, thence the custody was transferred to the King, which statute is the ground of the jurisdiction of the Crown over the persons and estates of lunatics in this Kingdom. For those who were non compotes mentis the King was to provide for the safety of their lands and tenements, that the non compotes and their families should be maintained out of the issues thereof, and the residue handed over to the owners when they recovered their senses; for lands were not to be aliened, and the King was to take nothing to his own use. Subsequent legislation has kept this principle in view. In 1547, during the reign of Henry VIII., a dissolved Monastery of St. Mary of Bethlehem in the City of London was given as a residence for lunatics, but in no way did the Common Law make provision for their care.

Now, by various statutes such provision is made, and though abuses have arisen in enforcing or neglecting them, they evidence a desire to atone for the indifference of our ancestors. The enlightened treatment of lunatics owes much to the Society of Friends, much to individual enthusiasts, much to the influences of civilization, much to French scientists, much to the progress of medical jurisprudence. So late as A.D. 1770 lunatics were exhibited at an hospital in York as a raree show, for one penny or twopence a visitor, but now, the abuses that may exist in asylums can be reached by inquiry and official supervision provided for by legislation, running through almost every year of the present reign. We believe it was by an order of the Emperor Napoleon that madhouses in France were designated maisons de santé, but the Emperor had regard for other matters than santé, for, in exercise of a grim humour, because of her perpetrating an epigram upon him he shut up the Duchess of Chevreuse in a madhouse, and because evidence could not be procured to implicate a future Prime Minister of France in a Royalist Conspiracy, he imprisoned Prince Polignac in

a madhouse for ten years. No necessity troubled him as to lettres de cachet, for the convenient shutting up in a maison de santé got rid of troublesome customers, whether epigrammatists or conspirators.

The subject of insanity becomes of wide interest when consideration is given to the numbers of the afflicted, the abuses that have grown up in reference to their treatment, and the differences that still exist between the legal and medical professions as to whether insanity be conduct of a certain character, or a certain disease whose effect is to produce such conduct. The lawyer has to deal with it as it affects criminal responsibility, the scientist as it may be alleviated by medical and moral appliances. The barbarous treatment to which insane persons were subjected for a lengthened period has gradually yielded to more humane and wiser consideration, the result of regarding madness as a disease of the body operating on the mind, a disease of the cerebral organization. It was not altogether unnatural to the middle. ages the ascribing to insanity some supernatural operation, some possession of the body by an external power, and the sufferer being regarded as subject to Divine displeasure, and therefore under Satanic influence, was consequently to be treated as barbarity and ignorance suggested.

It is said by Dr. Maudsley, in his book Responsibility in Mental Diseases, that this view of madness induced the belief that the devil was the moving power, and that therefore the victim should be treated as the devil if he could have been laid hold of. But however the idea originated, the cruel treatment existed, lunatics were confined in dungeons, loaded with chains, their food thrown to them as to beasts, instruments of torture held over them, till exhausted nature sank under the infliction, and the madness became chronic that care and attention might have averted.

"It is but as yesterday," says Chief Justice Cockburn, "that, in darkness and solitude, cut off from the rest of

mankind like the lepers of old, the dismal cell, the bed of straw, the iron chain, and the inhuman scourge were the fearful lot of those who were best entitled to human sympathy and to human pity, as being the victims of the most dreadful of all mortal calamities." This cruel treatment continued long after the idea of diabolical possession ceased, and its continuance has been attributed to those views of mind then prevailing in connection with the relations of body and mind which prohibited mental study by means of physical research, which limited the external observations of mental phenomena in their development, and did not influence the reason in regard of the bodily condition affected by mental action. Men were guided in this treatment as though insane persons were conscious of right and wrong, and were to be dealt with as regulated by their consciousness. When, however, insanity came to be regarded as a physical disease, to be alleviated by the ordinary remedies of medicine and thoughtful care, the cruelty ceased, and humane conduct began to influence the custodians of insane persons.

It is especially in reference to criminal responsibility that the subject comes as it were within the region of practical politics, whether a person alleged to be insane "guilty of crime had a sufficient degree of reason to know that the act he had done was right or wrong."

"It is

Sir Matthew Hale's test of responsibility was this: very difficult indeed to define the invisible line that divides perfect and partial insanity, but it must be duly weighed and considered both by the judge and jury, lest on the one side there be a kind of inhumanity towards the defects of human nature or on the other side too great an indulgence given to great crimes." Partial unsoundness of mind was held to be no excuse to exempt a man from responsibility for crime. This view has long since fallen into desuetude, and the more modern test of responsibility is that enunciated by Chief Justice Tyndale, who pronounced that the usual course is to