The Press. — London, England, 1858-08-28 00:00:00

B',lo numbers of persons, who are allowed to go free, ought to have been subjected to restraint. Now, we loathe and condemn, as strongly as any one, the conduct of those, who, taking advantage of their position as relatives, for their own ends, consign an unhappy individual, who is really sane, to the walls of a lunatic asylum. It is, perhaps, more than anything else calculated to drive a man niad ; and if our contemporaries were only directing their energies to cause measures to be taken to prevent so monstrous and fearful an out rage being ever again committed, or prolonged, we should have not one word of caution to say against the tone and object of their articles. But it appears to us that, by the cry which sonic of them are raising against private asylums, and by the obstacles which they would raise to the imposing restraint upon auy person, they are running the risk of creating a far greater evil than the one which they are desirous of remedy ing ; for, if the amount of human suffering now arising from the improper confinement of sane persons were to be weighed with the amount of suffering occasioned by the liberty possessed by insane persons, it would probably be found that the suffering arising from the latter cause is twenty-fold greater than that arisint , from the former : for, even under the present law, and its admitted defective administration, the difficulty of placing restraint—arising from the unwilling ness of friends and relations to have recourse to so extreme a measure, and their ignorance how to set about it—is so great that hundreds, more probably thousands, of persons who ought to be restrained are at full liberty, to the great danger of their own lives, and those of their families, and neighbours. IVhen a neighbourhood has been horrified by some frightful catastrophe, there is no lack of persons to cry shame on the relatives of the unhappy being, whose frenzy occasioned it. They are condemned for having shrunk from the discharge of a disagreeable duty, and for having preferre the chance of an awful crime being committed to incurring the responsibility of preventing it. flow many families are there at this present moment, where the wretched wife and children lie in daily dread of some murderous assault on themselves, or of the realization of suicidal propensities ? If the relatives of the criminal lunatics now in Bedlam had done their duty, many a valuable life would have been spared. IVe therefore deliberately affirm that we believe, so far from its being advisable to increase the difficulties of placing restraint on half, or wholly insane individuals, increased tiicilities, if possible, should be given in order to enable it to be done. None but those who have passed through the ordeal can tell the fearful amount of terror, and anxiety, which a family has to go through, from the first indications of the complaint, till its complete establishment admits of no doubt. There are few individuals, not in their right mind, who are not capable of talking on various subjects with the most perfect sanity and calmness. The intellectual powers of insane persons are not unfrequently greater than they were before their calamity came upon them and persons whom their own family know perfectly well to be insane will conduct themselves towards acquaintances as sanely and agreeably as ever. Now one of the demands which is being made is to give more publicity to cases of insanity. The effect of so doing will be most disastrous, both to the sufferer and to his family. Every professional man, who has to deal with the malady, will tell you that the chances of recovery mainly depend upon early treatment of the case. If the friends of a person know that they can onlv cause him to be subject to medical treatment, at the expense of his being, for ever after, publicly branded, as having been insane, how much more will they shrink from the early measures neces sary for his restoration than they do at present ? How long will it be before an affectionate wife, or parent, or child will bring themselves to take the fatal step which shall fix for ever a public brand upon the husband, the child, or the parent ? and yet by the delay the evil day may be only postponed, at the same time destroying the hist chance of recovery. These are considerations of the most important nature, which, in dealing with so distressing and delicate a subject, should never be lost sight of; and in amending the present system, which the recent cases render imperative, care ought THE PRESS, AUGUST 28, 1858. to be taken, in providing against its abuse, not to create other evils of as bad a character as those which it is sought to remedy. A more strict and efficient supervision of private asylums is which ought to be secured, but against the cruelty, both to the sufferer and to his tinily, of unnecessary publicity, we here emphatically protest. JESUITISM. PEPIN, front being the King's Lord Chamberlain, made himself the King. Such a rise tells its own story of craft, and courage, and ambition ; but it does by no means tell the whole story of how King PEPIN founded a dynasty. It was his alliance with the Papacy which showed the great intellectual power and longsightedness of PEPIN. The Pope was still a wanderer and an outcast, too weak to be feared as an enemy alone, but growing strong enough to be dreaded if he were to join with any rival pretender to a throne. To recognize the Pontiff's claims, set him up again upon his Holy Seat, and then, in turn, have his pontifical protection, was for PEPIN to make the Pope's interests his own. To be consecrated King by STEPHEN was the surest guaranty for the endurance of' a successful usurpation ; and to be restored to Rome and be defended by the arms of PEPIN, was for STEPHEN to be Pope indeed. The bargain was made, and it was stuck to. Rome was given back and Ravenna was added to Rome ; and STEPHEN gave France to PEPIN and his heirs for ever, in the name of Goo and of St. PETER, with an anathema upon an attempt to overthrow his dynasty. CHARLEMAGNE and ADRIAN faithfully carried on the work which was thus begun anew. A Roman Empire was again established, and again the Emperor took the Pontiff for his own and his Empire's Spiritual head. CHARLEMAGNE kissed the feet of LEO, and LEO crowned CHARLENIAONE successor of the C.ESARS. The brute force of the civil despot was to be at the disposal of him who was lord of the conscience, and the Pontiffs business was to take care no outbreak of human thought, no eruption of intellect, no spread of any sort of knowledge, should make the Imperial flocks and herds less easily governable or less cheerfully do their work as the proprietary animals of their crowned and mitred masters. The clergy had the higher task, as befitted their pre-eminence. The ignorance and superstition of the masses made despotism subservient to the clergy not only for impunity but from necessity. But the predominance of the clergy brought no real gain whatever to the people. Despotism was all the more iron and all the more grasping, and it identified itself completely with the timidity, the intolerance, and the cruelty of the priesthood. Soldiers were missionaries, massacres were the sermons preached, and bloody, secret tribunals did the work which hoodwiniced con science and the daylight would have shuddered at with too much horror. The ages which Rome had at hand might well be called "the dark ages," for " the true light, which lighteth every " man that cometh into the world." was not al lowed to shine within men nor around them. The Pontiff whom men had adopted in the place of GOD, and for their light and their salvation, and the priests who wielded that Pontiffs pre tended Divine authority, were such agents of ob struction and oppression as the world had never known before, and as only a vigorous, struggling Europe could have required. So much of Chris tilnity as was made an ingredient in what was called Christianity was of no other public or social influence than to keep the civil power in fear of the pontifical. It may, and indeed it must, have brought comfort and consolation to many a lone soul, but its general working was only degradation—deliberate, steady, almost hopeless degradation—happily, degradation for priests personally and morally as well as for peoples politically. France and Italy, Spain and Germany, shared, though unequally, in the common misery—com mon victims of a popular religion turned into a conspiracy and of priests organized into a polity. Already in the eleventh century, when ROBERT of France and his Queen, CONSTANCE, visited Orleans, there was a bonfire of thirteen human beings got up by the clergy as a spectacle and in honour of pure orthoxody; and m Germany Cita:wax VII. was raising all the land again s t the Emperor ; while in Spain a Catholic King wag taking for his wife an unconverted ItloOrish maiden and giving his Christian sister to the Sultan of TOLEDO. A century later an brxoc Err formally established the Inquisition, a Con ne d as formally prohibited the reading of either the Old or New Testament, and the lioxivaseas a n d the 13tormaic-r5 treated the Kings of Engl an d and Denmark as if they also were the liege s u b. jects of the Pope. The Popes, indeed, were very far from being always successful in the objects of their ambi tion ; but, however unsuccessful a Pope might be in any object, he always made it a losing game for whatever prince set himself up against hint. Nor were the priests and monks themselves al lowed to be independent or insubordinate now that Rome had acquired a larger experience of administration. The proudest religions the world knew of before the Jesuits of Loyot..k—the most wealthy, the best disciplined, the most dreaded— were sacrificed daringly and deliberately to the necessities of the times, and the civil arm wat used with a vengeance when CLEmarr V. made PHILIP turn Templars by scores in the very streets of Paris. But wealth and power, impunity and profligacy, again did their work for Rome, as Rome did the work of Europe's degradation. THE CHINESE TREATY. ltv, announced andt h t e h e r t i e nt 7i tion A f RUSSIANthe telegram Chinese has cu difficulty, has at once proceeded, agreeably to the law of the Printing-house-square platform, to " improve the occasion " for its own glory and the confu sion of national logic and morality. The homily put forth with these views, which many of our readers must have seen conspicuous in large type on Monday last, deserves some notice as showing the lengths to which reckless partizanship can carry even a clever writer. It commences sonic what modestly, with a confession of some surprise both at the manner and the matter of the intelli gence. This confession might be startling from its novelty, the usual line of that oracular print being that of COBBETT in the " Rejected Ad dresses "—" I prophesied that, tho' I never told anybody." But there was a special motive tar " assuming a virtue" on this occasion. The Times had unluckily been leading the public to believe, that, owing to a series of blunders which its " Own Correspondent" would have set right in half a paragraph, our Chinese operations were likely to be indefinitely protracted. The delicate avowal of " some surprise " was to disarm hostile criticism on this head. Avowal the second was perhaps less discreet, though not less true. To have frightened the Emperor into complete sub mission was doubtless " too easy for glory"; but this admission is a singular introduction to 3 column and a half of most unmitigated bragging. The attempt to build up for Lord PALNIEHSToN! z Chinese minority a reputation for comparative political foresight is simply fraudulent. A single phrase used by Sir JAMES GRAHAM is a poor ground for misstating the real bearing of the memorable debate in question. The opponents of the Bowring aggression did not question that we were strong enough to destroy, not Canton only, but Pekin also, if we chose ; that we could compel the Celestials to alter their laws at our . dictation, and to pay us "compensat ion money for transactions in which we were more to blame than they. Even could Lord PALx TON have proved (what, by the way, yet re mains to be tested by the statistics of future trade) that the extorted admission of " ouv barbarians " to the its and rivers o f t e flowery land would tend greatly to our orit n.a: tional advantage, the position of the inaj who censured the Bowring war would not have been shaken. They stood upon right, not exile diency. They said that there were nobler con : siderations than £a. d.—a high er law than law of the strongest. By a full and fair investiga: tion of the facts of the case, as fa r as the y mket' l'a then known, they showed that we had pic a nds quarrel on most discreditable ground s— g o unworthy the honesty of a com mercial Re° ir the justice of a Christian nation, or the