ko TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



as teachers are nowadays finding out in the one case, and as HoVbes 

 long ago found out in the other. How obvious it appears that, when 

 minds go deranged, there is no remedy but replacing the weak internal 

 control by a strong external control ! Yet the " non-restraint system " 

 has had far more success than the system of strait-waistcoats. Dr 

 Tuke, a physician of much experience in treating the insane, has lately 

 testified that the desire to escape is great when locks and keys are 

 used, but almost disappears when they are disused. And in further 

 evidence of the mischief often done by measures supposed to be cura- 

 tive, here is Dr. Maudsley, also an authority on such questions, speak- 

 ing of " asylum-made lunatics." Again, is it not clear that the repres- 

 sion of crime will be effectual in proportion as the punishment is 

 severe? Yet the great amelioration in our penal code, initiated by 

 Romilly, has not been followed by increased criminality, but by 

 decreased criminality; and the testimonies of those who have had 

 most experience Maconochie in Norfolk Island, Dickson in Western 

 Australia, Obermier in Germany, Montesinos in Spain unite to show 

 that, in proportion as the criminal is left to suffer no other penalty than 

 that of maintaining himself under such restraints only as are needful 

 for social safety, the reformation is great: exceeding, indeed, all antici- 

 pation. French school-masters, never questioning the belief that boys 

 can be made to behave well only by rigid discipline and spies to aid in 

 carrying it out, are astonished on visiting England to find how much 

 better boys behave when they are less governed nay, among English 

 schools themselves, Dr. Arnold has shown that more trust is followed 

 by improved conduct. Similarly with the anomalies of incorporated 

 human nature. We habitually accept the assumption that only by 

 legal restraints are men to be kept from aggressing on their neighbors ; 

 and yet there are facts which should lead us to qualify this assumption. 

 So-called debts of honor, for the non-payment of which there is no 

 legal penalty, are held more sacred than debts that can be legally 

 enforced ; and on the Stock-Exchange, where only pencil memoranda in 

 the respective note-books of two brokers guarantee the sale and purchase 

 of many thousands, contracts are far safer than those which, in the 

 outside world, are formally registered in signed and sealed parchments. 

 Multitudes of cases might be accumulated showing how, in other 

 directions, men's thoughts and feelings produce kinds of conduct which, 

 a priori, would be judged very improbable. And, if, going beyond 

 our own society and our own time, we observe what has happened 

 among other races, and among the earlier generations of our own 

 race, we meet, at every step, workings-out of human nature utterly 

 unlike those which we assume when making political forecasts. Who, 

 generalizing the experiences of his daily life, would suppose that men, 

 to please their gods, would swing for hours from hooks drawn through 

 the muscles of their backs, or let their nails grow through the palms 

 of their clinched hands, or roll over and over hundreds of miles to 



