The Press. — London, England, 1858-08-07 00:00:00

750 soldiers labouring under this malady has been expressed in many former reports, and we have contrasted those arrangements with the excellent provisions made for insane sailors at Haslar Hos pital. We are quite at a loss to understand why there should be so marked a difference between the two services, in the presence of the same calamity ; and it will not be held beyond the limits of our duty, while we regret the necessity we have been under of so frequently and so strongly animadverting on the continuance of this painful contrast, to add the expression of a hope that, amid the general sympathy and atten tion awakened lately to the condition of the soldier, the absence of all proper humane provi sion for his treatment under a disease to which accidents of service and changes of climate too frequently expose him will not much longer be overlooked." The treatment of single patients—i.e., patients for whom separate establishments are main tained—the Report thus describes : " On the whole the condition of the patients so visited cannot be described as satisfactory. As a general rule the accommodation provided is quite Incommensurate with the payments, which, in many instances, are very large. The necessity for our continued and regular supervision has been clearly established, and, in some instances, we have found cases of marked neglect. In two or three we have discovered that, besides the patient who has been regularly certified and returned to this office, the proprietors of houses have also had under their charge other persons of unsound mind, relative to whom no return what ever had been made. In these cases, although from the presence of circumstances of an ex tenuating character we have not deemed it proper to institute prosecutions for the legal penalties incurred, we have insisted, by way of warning to others against commission of the same or any similar offence, that the offenders should insert apologies in the daily and medical papers." Notwithstanding the following opinion of the Commissioners in Lunacy—" Our experience " has satisfied us that in no case should the land " belonging to an asylum be less than in " the proportion of one acre to four patients"— we find that the city of Bristol (because the Corporation cannot procure a larger quantity of land at " a reasonable price " within a convenient distance of the city) is building an asylum for 200 patients on a plot of ground measuring only twenty-two acres; that the counties of Carmar then, Cardigan, and Pembroke are about to give at the rate of only one acre to each six patients, and the borough of Maidstone at the rate of one to five. Surely, the health and recovery of the pauper should be considered before the pockets of the ratepayers ; but, looking at the question with even a mercenary eye, we are convinced that these bodies are making a mistake. In Appendix A we find the following entry : Superintendent Private. County. Houses. or Proprietor. M. F. Total. Essex .. High Beech .. Allen, Mrs. .. 6 10 16 The Commissioners, in their Report for the year 1854, tell us that on their first visit to Mrs. ALLEN'S establishment, which took place on the 18th December, 1852, they found— "One male patient (at Leopard's-hill] was se cluded in a room without a fire, and without a seat. He was sitting on the stretcher of his bed, imperfectly clothed. The room smelt very much of urine. We think that if this patient cannot be more comfortably accommodated, he should be removed to another asylum. Three of the mattresses, on which three female patients sleep in a room called the Long-room, are stained, old, and in a filthy condition. They are not fit for use, and should be immediately removed, and their place supplied by clean mat tresses." On the 7th March, 1853, having again visited this den, the Commissioners describe it in similar terms; and on a third visit, on the 10th November, 1853, they find the patients restrained in the most brutal manner—concluding their Re port with this observation : " The condition of this house, receiving private patients only, for the due maintenance and accommodation of whom considerable sums are generally paid, has re peatedly attracted th e special attention of the Visiting Commissioners; THE PRESS, AUGUST 7, 1858. and the discomfort and very indifferent state of this house, which had been animadverted upon in former entries, has more than once formed the subject of correspondence between this office and the proprietor." Why has not Mrs. ALLEN been punished for this cruelty ? Why is her house still licensed Is it right that poor helpless lunatics should be under such a roof? What were the visiting jus tices about that they did not discover these enor mities ? For what was the visiting physician paid 201. per annum out of the county rates of Essex ? and these pageants are supposed to growth of Christianity; but it is not that the Christianity of the Gospel no more to do with them than it had the religious wars of Europe, murders of the Inquisition, or with , which overflowed all Europe from palaces of Papal families in Rome. ' perhaps, all be numbered among the jus divinum ; but supposing them they must still be considered among ones. The wonder of wonders, the real of the Papal or Jesuit scheme is, not which it dealt with ignorant and barbarous but the way in which it meets the - sistance of more and more enlight the way in which it shows itself new antagonism which rises up against way it gathers strength from what struction, and makes its poverty r ness do the work of large revenues vitality. The real greatness of true that it deals with each age after its - befools as infinitely the nineteenth did the sixteenth, or the fourteet fourth, and makes its tools of reluctm nichs or ready Palmerstons, as it did TINE or CHARLEMAGNE, of WILLIAM Or LOUIS LE GROS. And the whole secret of that greatness the doctrine of jus divinum—in the succession of sacerdotal sovereigns from GOD to govern men in this world sanction of rewards and punishments • out according to their sentence in ' come. To engross wholly almost every learning, to have the principal share making and the administering of • were of themselves such sufficiem supremacy in barbarous ages that little need of any great development divinum till the twelfth and thirteent' In the fifteenth, however, it was What hold it had taken of the minds 1 men of every rank may be imagined such fact as MACHIAVELLI tells us nobleman, treacherously assassinated Cardinal CESAR BORGIA, spending breath in imploring his murderer to his wretched father, ALEXANDER VI., of his sufferings beyond the gray monster, the ex luisite incorporation vidual of vices that would competently nished a whole legion, to be regarded as the keeper of the keys of IL indeed to the unreflecting simply SPEARE calls a three-piled hyperbole yet it needs but the tiniest scruple to comprehend that it is the irresistil consequence of a visible succession of the ALMIGIITY upon earth. Poor that was the Italian's name, was s. they who smile at him, and yet stand divinum, are themselves the senseless reasoning. Common sense allows - the rights of GOD (if once ackno‘. vested in any created tribunal), but as are set by expediency or the superior armed force. Where there of smiting with anathema, and of the sentence of the condemned soul prisonment in hell, it is idle to talk , than discretionary submission to rests world, once honestly believing the of the authority, must be prepared . not only the conscience to blind obedience, the person to punishment and the confiscation. Nay, the reflections sense teach us still further—what, canons of the great tridentine count also—that goods should first be forfeit body first be subjected to the torture, sorting to the anathema, which turn the keys of heaven against entrance. And this constructive divinity, macy over themselves and over kings virtually acknowledged in 1 it at all, wa s th e unequa l a lly wit entered into confederacy. That made religion a worldly polity, became the larger part of religion, were made that they might do the when dogmas were everywhere above all laws. JESUITISM. IT is perhaps not surprising that there should be great difficulty in bringing common people to see religion in any other light than a simply religious one—to see it as anything else than a matter which rests between the individual and his Maker. It is hard for them to understand how religion can be grafted on to politics ; how humble faith and piety can be made use of for the tortuous purposes of State or party, and regarded merely as the fuel which keeps some great worldly machinery agoing. But it certainly is wonderful that there should still continue to be found a race of statesmen who attach no conse quence to the political character or the political uses of a dogma. Many and many a public man by no means blind to the power of religious convictions over men individually or in masses, and sharpsighted enough in dealing with any popular current of religious feeling, yet often seems quite blind to the fact that religious differ ences are by no means of necessity merely pole mical, that the religion of any large class of people never can be merely a religion, and that, so long as there are found men able, ambitious, and un scrupulous enough to work it, religion must always be the readiest and the surest lever to move men by, the strongest bond to bind men together with for political as well as for social purposes. It is no less strange than true that while ideas or theories become every day more and more spreading and more and more influen tial, practical men seem often more and more to affect the old contempt for them. And in this contempt for theories, the dogmas of faith and the schemes of discipline set up by any church or sect come in for a large, perhaps for the very largest share. It might be well enough to despise theories if they could only be kept theories, and were never to be developed into something else— if they never bred Reformations with decades of years of war, massacres like the St. Bartholomew, or Revolutions such as that of 1688 or of 1789 ; but what the mind perceives the man will act upon when time and place are given, and what men call theories work as terrifically and accord ing to as firmly established laws in politics, as what men call nature does in physics, only there are no barometers to tell us when moral thunder storms are nigh, and when they come we attribute them to any other cause than some such theory as moral electricity. GUICEIARDINI, LUTHER'S contemporary, was one of the ablest, most dispas sionate, and best informed statesmen of his day, but he could not be persuaded the Reformation was a religious movement. And FREDERICK THE GREAT himself worked away as steadily but as unsuspectingly at the French Revolution as if he had been only engaged at chess. There is no need, however, of Revolutions or Reformations, of civil wars or massacres, to show us what religious theories can do in the hands of those who know how to wield them. We have only to open our eyes and look around in any quarter of the habitable globe. The vast ruins of old monasteries, the majestic cathedrals still scattered through our land, the still more varied forms of enduring religious architecture on the Continent, the towers of Cologne, the marble fields of St. Peter's, the gorgeous simulachres of the Garter or the Golden Fleece, the solemn ceremonial by which kings and emperors borrow veneration from the clergy,—all these creations . , I, b e t haeyt hphera,eiuharaca not ()i n t, gr : al tulottto sohimpossible . tso2, had to do with the al or with the !. These may, the wonders of mong its lesser L e real greatness barbarous ages, the growing re- ightened ones; every against against it; the hat seemed de- y and nothing- ".l and vigorous rue Jesuitism is s own kind, and th century as it teenth, or the luctant Metter. lid of CoxsTAN- LM THE NORMAN ,Treatness lies in he theory of a I with authority vorld under the nts to be meted n the world to very branch of 1 share in the )f human laws, ,ent engines of hat there was opment of jar enth centuries. as full grown. inds of common ;fined from one Lis of an Italian ed by his friend ing his dying to obtain from VI., a remission ave. A model on in one indi- ently have fur- trded bond-tide Heaven, seems what SHAKE- 31e of folly, and of intelligence resistible, clear m of delegates oor VITEWZZO, Ls only logical; stand up for jou seless and un- 'S no limits to owledged to be but such limits re resistance of ere is the right of carrying out it by eternal im- lk of any other restraint. The Le divine origin d to surrender obedience, but he property to ms of common oat, indeed, the ouncil teach us )rfeited and the ture, before re- must for ever t the offender's r, whose PUP re. their subjects acknowledging pith whom they tat confederacY y, and politics r m, and dogmas , he work of law s r ecognized 23