434 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



patients has greatly increased in recent years. In other words, the 

 apparent increase of insanity is mainly marked among those who be- 

 come pauper patients. This is certainly in great measure accounted 

 for by the disproportionate accumulation of cases in pauper asylums, 

 for reasons into which it is not now needful to enter. It assuredly 

 does not prove that there has been anything like a corresponding 

 growth of insanity among the poor as compared with the rich. 



In any case, however, the illiterate population does yield a very 

 serious amount of insanity, and the fact is so patent that it shows be- 

 yond a doubt that ignorance is no proof against the inroads.of the 

 disease. The absence of rational employment of the mental powers 

 may lead to debasing habits and to the indulgence in vices especially 

 favorable to insanity, less likely to attract a mind occupied with lit- 

 erary and scientific pursuits. No doubt mental stagnation is in itself 

 bad, but the insanity arising out of it is more frequently an indirect 

 than a direct result. If a Wiltshire laborer is more liable to insanity 

 than other people, it may be not merely because his mind is in an un- 

 cultivated condition, but rather because his habits, 1 indirectly favored 

 by his ignorance, and the brain he inherited from parents indulging 

 in like habits, tend to cause mental derangement. It is conceivable 

 that he might have had no more mental cultivation, and yet have 

 been so circumstanced that there would have been very little liability 

 to the disease. This distinction is extremely important if we are 

 tracing causes, however true it would remain that ignorance is a 

 great evil. A South-Sea islander might be much more ignorant than 

 the Wiltshire laborer, and yet not be so circumstanced that he w T ould 

 be likely to transgress the laws of mental health. The ignorance of 

 an African tribe and that of a village in Wilts may be associated, the 

 one with very little, the other with very much lunacy. Mr. Bright's 

 "residuum" of a civilized people and a tribe of North American In- 

 dians are alike uneducated, but, notwithstanding, present totally dif- 

 ferent conditions of life. We have no doubt that in a civilized com- 

 munity there will always be found by far the larger number of insane 

 persons. There are three grand reasons for this. First, because those 

 who do become insane, or are idiotic among savages, " go to the wall " 

 as a general rule ; the other reasons are to be discovered in the mixed 

 character and influence of European civilization ; its action on the 

 one hand in evolving forms of mental life of requisite delicacy and 

 sensibility, easily injured or altogether crushed by the rough blasts 

 from which they cannot escape in life ; and on the other hand in pro- 

 ducing a state confounded, as we have said, with savagery, but which 

 differs widely from it, and is, simply in relation to mental disorders, 

 actually worse. Recklessness, drunkenness, poverty, misery, charac- 



1 Dr. Thurnam, the late superintendent of the Wilts County Asylum, found that the 

 proportion of cases caused by drink in this county was very high in one year (1872) 

 amounting to thirty-four per cent. 



