HYGIENE AS A BASIS OF MORALS. 75 



Its effects, if long-continued, are to pauperize and permanently bru- 

 talize, just in proportion as it induces physical deterioration ; and 

 none so well as the pathologist knows the extent of the organic de- 

 generation which accompanies and underlies the moral degradation 

 which is, in fact, the corpus delicti, the very substance and body of 

 the offense. Hence the descent to Avernus by this route is not only 

 easy, but, once fully inaugurated, the return becomes difficult if not 

 impossible. Hoc opus est, hoc labor est.* Such a traveler burns his 

 bridges in crossing them, and, the physical basis of moral living being 

 destroyed, the full restoration of the superstructure becomes a physio- 

 logical and hence a moral impossibility. For the benefit of those 

 whose thoughts are trained to run in curves to whom a tempera- 

 ture-chart represents the condensed eloquence of a whole chapter of 

 description the statement may be made that in one of the few series 

 of exact observations in this direction the curve of alcoholic expendi- 

 ture was found to be followed bv the curve of arrests for crime of all 

 kinds, even more closely than by the curve of arrests for drunken- 

 ness ; showing, to a demonstration, that the crime-stage does not 

 always wait for the drunken-stage that the slow and silent deteriora- 

 tion due to alcoholic drinks is not necessarily dependent on their ex- 

 cessive use. But from that most instructive history of the Jukes, 

 already cited, it appears that certain physical and mental disorders 

 often precede the appetite for stimulants, and that the real cause of 

 their use, in a large proportion of cases, is antecedent physical exhaus- 

 tion, either hereditary or acquired. Both the prevention of constitu- 

 tional disease and its cure (if such a thing be possible) will then do 

 much toward the prevention of inebriety and the crimes and lesser 

 immoralities which grow out of it. Disease is the equivalent of 

 weakness, and induces not only physical indifference but moral apathy. 

 Dr. Bruce Thompson, Surgeon to the General Prison of Scotland, 

 says : " In all my experience, I have never seen such an accumulation 

 of morbid appearances as in the autopsies of the prisoners who die 

 here. Almost every organ of the body is more or less diseased ; and 

 their moral nature seems equally diseased with their physical frame." 



The intimate relationship between nervous diseases and crime is 

 conspicuous. In England, the ratio of insane to sane criminals is 

 thirty-four times as great as of the insane to the whole population, 

 and criminal lunatics are in excess in the high proporton of seventeen 

 to one.f 



The statistics of insane hospitals in our own country show that in- 

 sanity, in a large proportion of cases, is associated with unhygienic 

 living both overwork and want of work, as well as monotony of 

 work, being fruitful of this kind of degeneracy. A considerable per- 

 centage- of the insane women in our hospitals is drawn from country 

 farms. The monotonous drudgery of their daily lives, and the little 



* This is the need, in this is the work. f " Book of Health," Malcolm Morris. 



