THE STORY OF A COLONY FOR EPILEPTICS. 665 



their means. This necessitates their being divided into classes ; 

 and it was found very difficult, when they were all living together, 

 to provide first and second class patients with the comforts for 

 which they paid, without exciting the jealousy of the third-class 

 patients, many of whom are admitted free. And, what was much 

 more serious, it was proved that people subject only to occasional 

 attacks suffered severely from being brought into close contact 

 with those who were already sunk in idiocy. Thus, there were 

 strong reasons for making a radical change in the organization of 

 the Labor Home ; and, after much anxious consideration, its 

 managers, principally by the influence of Dr. von Bodelschwingh, 

 decided on a bold move. They resolved to give up the large new 

 house entirely to the female patients, and to provide other homes 

 for the boys and the men. 



On one side of the Bethel estate the great Teutoburgian For- 

 est stretches for miles away, forming a barrier, as it were, be- 

 tween it and the outside world. The forest is traversed by little 

 valleys, each separated from its fellows by high ridges densely 

 covered with trees. Before the colony was started the only hu- 

 man habitations to be found in these valleys were a few small 

 homesteads and some Jager-huts. Although, here and there, little 

 patches had been cleared, no serious attempt had been made to 

 bring the forest land under cultivation, the amount of labor re- 

 quired for the work being too great for any ordinary capitalist to 

 be willing to undertake it. The Bethel institution, however, occu- 

 pies a different position from that of an ordinary capitalist ; its 

 difficulty is to provide work for its workers, not workers for its 

 work. Thus the forest offered it the very thing it stood most in 

 need of — an almost boundless field for the employment of the un- 

 skilled labor of its epileptic patients. The land was supposed to 

 be of little value ; the managers of Bethel, therefore, secured 

 upon easy terms the two valleys which lay nearest their estate, 

 together with the houses and other buildings which stood there. 

 Hither, by degrees, they transferred all their male patients. In 

 compliance with the strongly expressed wish of the men, instead 

 of building a few large houses for them to live in, it was decided 

 to utilize the little homesteads which were already there and to 

 erect others of a similar kind. The patients themselves were set to 

 work, and soon quite an important village sprang up. There are 

 cottages for the old, for the young, and for the middle-aged ; for 

 the mentally or physically feeble, and for the mentally or phys- 

 ically strong. Some are reserved entirely for imbeciles, while 

 others, remote from the rest, are set aside for the hopelessly insane. 

 There are, in fact, homes for people in all stages of the disease, 

 homes, too, for people of all ranks and stations ; for one of the 

 great advantages of the cottage system now in force in Bethel — 



YOL. XLII. — 45 



