37° 



The National Geographic Magazine 



proportion as the stresses incident to 

 the struggle for existence become men : 

 tal stresses is borne out by the facts. 

 The frontiersman who takes his family 

 and goes west to open up new territory, 

 engage in legitimate agricultural pur- 

 suits, and grow up with the country is 

 pretty apt to be of hardy stock, and in- 

 sanity, if it appears at all, comes in 

 later generations. It is different, how- 

 ever, with those states that have great 

 mineral wealth. Here the attraction 

 appeals to all the wandering, unsettled, 

 rifraff of the country, who hasten to the 

 newly discovered fields in the hope of 

 acquiring a fortune quickly. Arrived 

 there they yield to all the seductions of 

 intemperance ; vice and disease wreak 

 their ravages upon a predisposed soil, 

 and our ratios show a corresponding in- 

 crease. This is the situation with Cali- 

 fornia. This state, and to a somewhat 

 less extent the whole Pacific coast, is 

 still suffering from the effects of the 

 " gold fever " of '49, and its citizens 

 are paying the price even ' ' unto the 

 third and fourth generations. ' ' In this 

 connection it is interesting and signifi- 

 cant to note that the mining states and 

 the states of the Pacific slope, viz, 

 Montana, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, 

 Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and Cali- 

 fornia, all show a much greater number 

 of male than female insane, a condi- 

 tion that prevails nowhere else in the 

 country, with the single exception of 

 Minnesota, and it has arisen here al- 

 most wholly in the decade from 1880 to 

 1890, during which period the state has 

 increased in population over half a 

 million. Minnesota also has large 

 lumbering interests, and conditions in a 

 lumbering region are similar to those in 

 a mining region. In the normal order 

 of things we expect to find a slightly 

 higher percentage of insanity in the 

 female sex, but the "get-rich-quick" 

 fever attracts more men than women 

 and mining districts as a rule are defi- 

 cient in their proportion of women. 



This state of affairs has apparently not 

 yet been recovered from in California. 

 We must also remember with reference 

 to California in particular that it is a 

 coast state and suffers from the effects of 

 immigration, and that the percentage of 

 insanity is invariably higher in the for- 

 eign born than in the native population. 

 This law of the increase of insanity 

 in the oldest settled districts and its de- 

 crease in the newly settled districts is 

 well stated by A. O. Wright in the Pro- 

 ceedings of the National Conference of 

 Charities and Correction, in 1884. He 

 says : "A very powerful cause for the 

 increase of insanity in this country was, 

 so far as I know, first pointed out by 

 the writer in 1881, before the census of 

 1880 had been tabulated, in the Annual 

 Report of the Wisconsin State Board of 

 Charities and Reform, and was stated 

 in debate at the National Conference of 

 Charities and Correction, at Madison, 

 in 1882. Having made a census of the 

 insane under public care in Wisconsin, 

 the writer, on reducing the number by 

 counties to the ratio to the population 

 of the several counties, was astonished 

 to find here a general law : That the 

 older settled counties had the largest 

 ratio of insane to the population , and that 

 the ratio steadily decreased and reached 

 the smallest ratio in the pioneer counties 

 on the north. This seemed to show that 

 a new country has a smaller proportion, 

 of insanity than an old country. 



' ' When the Compendium of the Census- 

 of 1880 was published, the writer, from 

 the numbers given then, immediately 

 calculated the ratios to the population! 

 and arranged the states and territories- 

 geographically instead of alphabetic- 

 ally. ' ' From the figures thus obtained 

 he concludes that "* * * allowing 

 for exceptional cases, the proportion of 

 insanity decreases as you go toward the 

 newer settled states, from about one in 

 every 350 of the population in Massa- 

 chusetts to about one in 1900 in Colo- 

 rado.' ' 



