friends did not, or would not, step forward to undertake the responsibility.' Dr. Anstie, the well-known London physician: "I know of nothing excepting entire seclusion for a long period, and under the most absolute and despotic restraint, that would have the least chance of doing any good whatever.' The late Dr. Forbes Winslow : 'Such institutions are to my mind one of the great and crying wants of the age. I believe such institutions would be a national blessing, and self-supporting.' Mr. Nelson (Manager of Queensberry Lodge): All that we want is power to detain them.' And, finally, the late and celebrated Dr. Simson, of Edinburgh: These are all, I think, cases of madness in the true sense of the word; and if they are not dealt with as such, they should be.'*

Detention, therefore, whether resulting in cure or not, is a manifest duty to society and to the patient. If his restoration be not effected, it is, at all events, a far more humane measure on the part of a Christian Government to protect him from himself than to connive at a state which endangers life and property. We venture to think that the objections now urged against legislative action will, before long, be looked back upon with astonishment. These objections, which are fully ventilated and answered before the Commission, may be thus stated. 1. The danger of mistakes on the part of medical men. 2. The fear of innocent persons being incarcerated by designing relatives. 3. The expense which such institutions, which ought neither to be incorporated with lunatic asylums† nor with jails, would cost the State. The first objection, as may easily be believed, is made very light of by medical men, who know that the diagnosis is simpler and the characteristics more marked in dipsomania than in many other forms of insanity. These refuges also, it stands to reason, would be under the same system of inspection, official and medical, as lunatic asylums now are. It is equally fallacious to fear that a legal power to restrain such patients would put a dangerous weapon into the hands of their families. That same intermittent nature of the mania, to which we have before called attention, interposes a peculiar check here. The family, according to a stock phrase, are afraid of consequences.' They know that sobriety will intervene, and with it ill-will, and perhaps revenge. The real difficulty, therefore, anticipated, is that of inducing the family to come forward

*Dr. Peddie on 'Dipsomania,' p. 21.

+ Their connection with lunatic asylums has caused their failure in Australia. People will not fasten on their relatives the stigma of real insanity.

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'Not one family in a hundred,' according to a chief medical witness, would dare to exercise the power.' At the same time the authority of the act must be based on the deposition on oath of the nearest relative-wife, husband, father, or son-endorsed, it is proposed, by the minister of the parish, and one or more medical certificates.

But American experience, as already hinted, shows that such legal authority would be virtually a dead letter; the fact of its existence being in itself both a check in early stages of the tendency, and an inducement to surrender voluntarily. In the province of Quebec an Act was passed in 1870 enabling a Judge for the Superior Court of Lower Canada, on application on oath from relations or friends, to pronounce the interdiction of such habitual drunkard, and to appoint a curator to him to manage his affairs and control his person, as in the case of one interdicted for insanity.' But Mr. Dalrymple states, on the authority of the Attorney-General of the province of Quebec, that the Act was hardly ever put in force; the fact of its existence, or, at most, the threat of its enforcement,-in short, 'the legal rod over them,'-being sufficient to inducea man either to control himself, or to submit to treatment; so that 94 per cent. of the cases admitted into these institutions are voluntary.

*

As to the minor question of treatment, one point is emphatically decided by the medical witnesses, namely, the necessity and feasibility of cutting off all alcoholic supplies at Dr. Anstie says: The question would only be complicated by letting them down by degrees. The only way is to cut them off from drink altogether, and that is perfectly and absolutely safe, and the only thing that is calculated to do good.'

once.

And the continuance of the good is only insured by a continuance of the same measure. The dreadful temptation may be conquered, the spell broken, but, like a train of gunpowder, it will kindle with a spark. The most moderate taste-the joining in a toast an injudicious prescription after getting weteven, sad to say, the sip of the sacramental wine, has been known to summon up the demon afresh. For the man, therefore, who has been rescued, yet as by fire, there is no half-way place between safety and destruction. He must either surrender

himself again to demoniacal possession, or walk the strait and narrow way, 'a Nazarite unto the Lord.'

* Quotations from the Act, Question 1393, are given, too long for insertion here, which suggest an admirable model for English legislation.

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Of course, such questions were not mooted before the Commission without the liberty of the subject' being fondly brought up, and as admirably answered. The hardship of a dipsomaniac being kept under restraint when sober, and therefore sane, was met by the fact that the same happens to the lunatic in his lucid intervals. The needlessness of restraining a man in cases where he can only injure himself, elicits the just retort that we have a duty as fellow-citizens to care for one who cannot care for himself. The injustice of assuming control over a drunkard's property only because he is wasting his means, when plenty of extravagant men are allowed to do the same with impunity, draws out the intelligent distinction that the drunkard's waste leads to a disease which may engender crime. Another question why the dipsomaniac should be under restraint, and the kleptomaniac not, was unfortunate; the fact being that, under the Lunacy laws, there is power to detain that class of mania in an asylum. The question of expense was also fully entered into a question of some complication, but of no positive difficulty. With regard to the upper classes, such institutions would be entirely self-supporting, as the insane asylums provided for their more innocent brethren now are. And they would be on the same footing, only with more liberty; for the care and medical supervision is after a time limited to the insuring the absence of the fatal cup. Books, papers, music, billiards, all would be provided: also gardens of the most inviting kind; and, as exercise is imperative, the power of horse exercise and hunting; one head of a private asylum stating that he himself keeps a pack of harriers for his patients.

But the greater proportion of habitual drunkards in this country belong to the lower orders; filling our prisons, hospitals, workhouses, and lunatic asylums. The position of a pauper or a criminal-and the drunkard of that class is sure to be one or the other-is radically different from that of a man of independent means. He must be maintained at the expense of the State, and therefore he must work. Nor can society afford to let him go at large so long, or sink so fatally deep, as his richer brother. The military definition of an habitual drunkard is, as we have seen, the fact of being drunk four times in the year; or rather, being reported to be so; for the soldier may be drunk as often as he will, if he so comport himself as to keep out of the 'defaulter's book.' By the same rule it is proposed that three or four committals for that excess of inebriety which entails disorderly conduct shall be considered sufficient to qualify a man to be relegated to an asylum; there to be detained till better

habits

habits of mind and body are formed. Once there, and health restored, his work would not only keep himself but his family. If he knew no trade he could be taught one, as in the case of some prisons. The governor of the Borough prison of Kingstonupon-Hull deposes that the labour of the inmates might be very profitable; and that the surplus, after deducting 6s. a week for their keep, would leave very much more for their families than they get out of such men when at liberty. At a Discharged Prisoners' Home at Wakefield a man pays 7s. a week for his maintenance, and can make 23s. a week by mat-weaving. Nor, from the nature of the cases, would the expenses be so heavy as for a prisoner, from thirty to forty inmates being easily overlooked by one officer. Would not this be a better mode, whether of punishment or reform, than allowing a man or woman to come into a gaol forty or fifty, or a hundred times, each time more incapable of honest work or moral cure than the last? That experiment has been tried to excess, and has never answered. No poor wretch has ever been really bettered by reiterated sentences of seven or fourteen days. The cost of Anne Scott, with her many aliases, who had been committed fifty-nine times, would have paid for a far longer period in an inebriate asylum than would have sufficed, with God's grace, to cure her, soul and body. The poor old Bible stealer, who showed 'a root of good in things evil,' might have ended his life peacefully in his own land! If looked at reasonably it is astonishing that systems of punishment should be persevered in, proved by lengthened experience to be utterly vain, whether for prevention, correction, or reformation; and which, furthermore, all connected with their administration alike deplore and condemn. national respect for the law has its evil side when it allows such a routine exercise of it to continue unquestioned. It is impossible to imagine a greater expense in money, crime, and lives and souls of men than is caused by that fatal vice which is allowed to spread, blossom, and seed, to all intents unchecked among us. We have said enough about the crime that appears in the calendar: but there are the wrongs of the defrauded minds of the idiots-out of 300, 145 known to have come of drunken parents; there are the sufferings of the crippled bodies of little innocents, fed, not with milk fit for babes, but with strong gin. The very shame of society hides some of the results of this prevailing curse. The frequent verdict on suicides of temporary insanity' is so returned when the cause is known to have proceeded from intemperance, 'because,' as the coroners depose, 'juries, for the sake of the family, are disinclined to

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return verdicts reflecting disgrace on the memory of the deceased.**

Mr. Dalrymple's Bill, 'For the better care and management of Drunkards,' had been read once, and was down for a second reading in the spring Session of 1873, when Mr. Gladstone's temporary resignation caused an adjournment of the House. This postponed the prosecution of the measure till the next year, by which time its humane and indefatigable advocate-chiefly owing to his labours and anxieties in the cause-had, in the prime of his life, passed away from this world. But he had done the good work as far as it depended on individual exertion, and it remains all prepared and ready to be carried to its desired consummation.

We have dwelt the more on this branch of the enormous subject in consequence of a late important movement to bring it again to the attention of the Legislature. A deputation from the most eminent members of the medical profession-in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin-headed by Sir Thomas Watson, and presented by Lord Shaftesbury-waited early this last July on the Home Secretary with a memorial, setting forth the urgent need of legal control over habitual drunkards for their own personal safety, for the protection of their families, and for the welfare of society; and recalling the recommendation for Sanataria or Reformatories, which resulted from the Commission of 1873. The 'great practical difficulties' dwelt on, though not defined by Mr. Cross, are doubtless identical in great measure with those which the Commission successfully elicited and refuted. It is devoutly to be hoped that the public will not allow this special question to rest; indispensable as it is, under every view, to the welfare of hundreds of thousands in this country. The real reason why Government continues to ignore this evil is because, as simply stated by the late Dr. Forbes Winslow, the Legislature does not recognise habitual drunkenness as a form of insanity, though medical men do.' With this Report before them, such a plea can no longer be valid.

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As to the larger general question of the Intemperance of the land, those particular difficulties which we have here endeavoured to refute will not present formidable obstacles. But there are others, not so lightly confessed, or easily met, because deeply interwoven with private and public interests on a gigantic scale, of which no one will attempt to make light. Still, delay will not facilitate their solution; and it is, therefore, simply a

* Report of Convocation, p. 85.

question