10 CHARLES RICHMOND HENDERSON 



and results they may be summarized in the form of maxims 

 of experience. Helpless invahds, insane patients, paupers 

 in remote poorhouses, feeble minded persons, can not defend 

 themselves, can not reach the organ of influence, can not plead 

 in courts of equity for themselves. A humane society will 

 provide for a hearing in the forum of publicity. History 

 teaches us that where abuses are possible they will occur; that 

 professional officers are not to be trusted to inspect and report 

 on their own conduct in office and be permitted to exercise 

 irresponsible power. When officials resent interference from 

 outside, the alarm should be sounded from every home. A 

 democracy can not dictate a system of medical practice, but 

 it can judge of a pohcy when its fruits are made known in com- 

 parative tables of sickness and mortahty. The great pubfic 

 is awkward enough, and sometimes foolish, but it is competent 

 to see the difference between bad and good management of 

 an institution by comparing the use made of severity and 

 violence to secure order, and in the increase or decrease of 

 disease due to filth or neglect. Therefore, granting, as the 

 present writer does, that state boards of control, properly 

 organized, are demanded by the teachings of world experience, 

 it must also be insisted that this concession does not touch the 

 question of supervision. Boards of control are salaried ad- 

 ministrators, and if kept in office long enough may become 

 experts. But when infallibihty is claimed for them, with 

 audacity of assertion and paucity of proof, we must insist 

 again on the argument that no body of officials has the moral 

 right to pass on its own conduct of affairs. The fact is that 

 we already have boards of control in all the states, perhaps 

 too many of them; and the new movement is simply one to 

 consoHdate them, pay them, and secure the advantages of 

 economy and responsibihty which are hkely to result from the 

 proposed arrangement. It is probable that a board of control 

 for each great group of public institutions, penal, sanitary, 

 educational, charitable, agricultural, etc., may prove to be 

 a wise measure, and experiments are already on trial to test 

 this hypothesis. But the inteUigent friends of the poor and 

 helpless must hold together in making the demand that the 

 voluntary service of inteUigent and benevolent representatives 



