334 INSANITY. 



numerous in which male slaves among the Turks, even at 

 this day, have outlived any stigma that might have originally 

 attached to their condition of slavery ; have risen to offices 

 of high rank, their slave origin forgotten or unheeded. Social 

 treatment of the insane up to a period not long gone by 

 furnishes another instance of Christianity failing to illustrate 

 the precept of good-will towards mankind, which ostensibly 

 lies at its foundation. 



Civilised pagan nations regarded their insane as indivi- 

 duals filled with a certain divine afflatus ; and amongst Moham- 

 medans the demented have ever been cared for with tender- 

 ness and respect. It was the sad specialty of Christians 

 to treat their insane cruelly. The idea of demoniacal pos- 

 session brought this about. Tacitly, if not openly, the belief 

 prevailed that aberration of reason, by whatever name desig- 

 nated, was directly referable to possession by some evil spirit. 

 This idea once engrafted on vulgar or unreasoning minds, 

 caused much of the evil to which the insane were subjected. 



Mingled with the character of even the best of mankind 

 there exists a certain lurking germ of cruelty, ever ready to 

 spring into life and action under favouring influence. Of 

 the institution of African slavery in the Southern States of 

 North America, the remark has often been made, that the 

 deteriorative influences of the system are not illustrated by 

 the negro race alone, but in a higher degree. upon the whites. 

 The power of inflicting pain upon the subject race is said, 

 in this instance, to have begotten insensibility to pain. In 

 madhouse management of olden time unquestionably this oc- 

 curred. Tortures from which attendants, brought up under 

 the milder example of recent times, would turn with loathing 

 and horror, were, up to the end of the last century, and, 

 indeed, the beginning of the present century, enacted with 

 complacency, nay, under the belief that the perpetrators were 

 doing an act of justice to God and benefit to mankind. 



As though the surprise-bath were not bad enough under 



