352 
Insanity and its Difficulties . 
[June, 
the grim fadt that among the poorer classes in England 
mental disease has during the last forty years been multi- 
plied at the rate of 300 per cent, as against an increase ot 
population of only 45 per cent. Nay, the late President of 
the British Psychological Association predicted that it the 
present growth of insanity continues at the same rate, we 
shall have, by the year 1912, a million and a quarter ot 
lunatics in this our “ highly favoured country. We believe 
that the estimate will rather fall short of than exceed the 
mark. We fear that even now the persons outside the pale 
of palpable insanity, but who are still guided by morbid 
emotions rather than by sound reason, and who are incapable 
of following a chain of causation of more than two links, 
may be counted by hundreds of thousands, and are conse- 
quently a serious and a formidable element in the community. 
What if the old saw “ Quern Deus vult perdere should 
prove to be literally true ? 
We do not, however, stand alone. Our kinsmen across 
the Atlantic are suffering, if less, only less than ourselves. 
France, Germany, Holland, Austria,— in fadt Europe gene- 
rally is moving in the same direction. So that not the 
British Empire alone, but modern civilisation as a whole, 
unlike that of classical antiquity, may perish, not irom 
luxury, but from lunacy. , , , ^ . 
Surely, in face of such fadts and of such prospedts, not 
merely physicians and jurists, but society at large, might 
do well to seek out what are the causes of this growing 
plague, and what hope is there that it may yet be stayed. 
Before asking after the cause of a phenomenon we shall 
do well to give it a definition, and here for all pradlical pur- 
poses we cannot do better than take the one which Dr. Beard 
offers “ Insanity is a disease of the brain in which mental 
co-ordination is seriously impaired.” This definition, it is 
true, does not stake out an absolute boundary line between 
sanity and insanity ; but those who have studied Nature 
know full well that sharp antithetical classifications are m 
their essence not merely artificial,, but delusive. Sanity 
shades gradually away into insanity, even as day into 
night and as each colour of the spedtrum passes into its 
nel But the fadt that we cannot run a hard and fast line be- 
tween blue and green does not render us less able to distin- 
guish them, and precisely similar is the case with mental 
health and mental disease. r , , 
Dr. Beard’s definition of insanity has the further advan- 
tage that it makes no assumptions. Those who consider 
