422 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



make great expenditures for the prevention and cure of pauperism, for 

 the repression and punishment of crime, for the treatment of lunatics 

 of various sorts, for the care of idiots of various grades, for the special 

 treatment of inebriates, for the cure of the sick in hospitals, for gen- 

 eral measures of prevention, as regards epidemics, and yet no one 

 will gainsay my assertion that on no subject are our Legislature, and 

 all our various public bodies, so utterly blind as on this. If we look 

 at the result of this as regards expenditure, the case is bad enough. 

 The amount annually expended in all our States for this purpose is 

 enormous. The only approach which we have to the palaces of the 

 Old World are in the various hospitals and prisons and asylums 

 of the Kew. I can speak of this want of knowledge from personal 

 experience. I can stand in the confessional on this subject. It has 

 been my lot more than once to vote on such appropriations in a legis- 

 lative body. I remember especially one case where the Legislature of 

 this State was called upon to establish a great asylum, at vast expense, 

 for a certain class of lunatics. The case was very pressing. A care- 

 ful report from a commission showed that some provision of this sort 

 must be made. A bill was passed, the buildings were erected, and 

 yet, when all was done, we were assured by an expert, who had no inter- 

 est one way or the other in the matter, that all our well-meant benev- 

 olence had, perhaps, resulted in almost as much evil as good, and that 

 the whole institution was a failure as regards the immediate purposes 

 for which it was erected. The simple cause for this was that in that 

 whole Legislature, in the lower House, in the upper House, in the Ex- 

 ecutive Department, there was not one person who had ever given any 

 close attention to subjects of this kind, and we had been obliged to 

 trust entirely to those who could give us scraps of information, no 

 matter how crude. But, if the immediate results are unfortunate, the 

 remote results are still more so. 



If any one wishes to see what vicious methods of dealing with 

 great social questions will produce, he has only to look at the great 

 harvest of evil which England is now reaping from seed sown 300 

 years ago, especially as regards the treatment of her pauper and crim- 

 inal classes. I have said that there is no provision for thorough in- 

 struction. The reason is twofold. The first is the reluctance of edu- 

 cators to take up new subjects of study, or, at least, to present them 

 thoroughly. But the other and far more effective reason is the fact 

 that we have so few institutions for advanced education which have 

 the means to make provision for such teaching. The last report of the 

 Commissioners of Education at Washington shows that we have in 

 this country about 400 establishments calling themselves colleges or 

 universities. You may count on your fingers all those which really 

 have any claim to either title. In obedience to the demands of sect 

 or of locality, we have gone on multiplying institutions insufficiently 

 endowed, wretchedly wanting in every thing necessary to scientific 



