228 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



to find that the most numerous class of unfortunates are from the 

 farm, yet in England only about one-fifth of the population is 

 agricultural." But the number of farm laborers is large as com- 

 pared with those there recognized in the census as farmers— or the 

 managers of large estates. When T recall what I saw of the 

 miserable condition of these farm laborers in England and Scot- 

 land, I only wonder that insanity is not more common among them. 

 Lest I may seem to exaggerate, I quote the words of the favorite 

 of the working classes of Great Britain. Says John Bright : 

 "Fearful suffering exists among farm laborers in almost every 

 part of this kingdom. What wretched, uncared for, untaught 

 brutes, in helpless, stolid ignorance, are the people who raise the 

 crops on which we live, and what dirt, vice, and misery in the 

 houses where seven or eight persons of both sexes are penned up 

 together in one rickety, foul, vermin-haunted bed-room — their 

 wages reduced to the very lowest point at which their lives can be 

 kept in them. They are heart-broken, despairing men — reduced 

 to such brutality, recklessness, audacity of vies and extreme help- 

 lessness that they have no aspirations to better their condition." 

 Rev. James Martineau says : " Where is the laborer by whose 

 hand the soil has been tilled ? In a cabin, with his children, where 

 the domestic decencies cannot be." Says Rev. Dr. Riggs, of 

 London : "His ecttrge is too often a wretched double cell, where 

 penury cowers, cbrstity can hardly survive, female delicacy must 

 be unknown — the house only a shelter, full of cumber and litter. 

 Such are the homes of a majority of our English peasantry in the 

 southern, western, and south middle districts, and of many in 

 most parts of England, and in wide districts of Scotland and 

 Wales." That insanity should abound among such a class is not 

 strange. Dr. A. E. Macdonald, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence 

 in the University of New York, and Medical Superintendent of 

 the New York City Asylum for the Insane, recently stated that 

 the proportion of the insane to the sane in different countries was 

 about 1 to 1000. In New York State, according to the latest sta- 

 tistics it was 1 to 800, but in England it was 1 to 300. It is a 

 well attested fact that insanity is specially prevalent in England. 



A careful investigation of the question of the health of the 

 farmers of Massachusetts was made a few years since, under the 

 direction of the State Board of Health. Some fifty eminent phy- 

 sicians, practicing in different agricultural districts, were invited 

 to give the results of their wide observations and experience on 



