tendents and trustees alike to the tests of science, economy, humanity, and justice. Pages might be filled with proofs of the good influence of the board, in the words of both English and foreign writers. Those familiar with the great reforms brought about by our recent boards of charities in almshouses, county jails, and poor-houses, can readily imagine how English asylums have been regenerated-no more despotism, no more secrecy, no more extravagance, no more lobbying, no more asylum politics.

Every house, hospital, asylum, or place where lunatics are kept is subject to the approval and the visitations of the board. The detailed rules for the government of each, and lists of the diet required to be supplied, must be hung in conspicuous places upon its walls and filed with the board. Not an inmate can be received or discharged anywhere in the kingdom without a prompt report to that body of the authority and the reasons; nor the death of a lunatic happen without an instant statement of the cause and the name of the physician in charge being sent to the board. Six times a year in most sections, and four times elsewhere, an inspection must be made by the board of every asylum, public and private. The inspections must be not only of the main buildings but of "every out-house and place," and the inspectors on each occasion "must see every patient." They must make minutes of the situation "in general and particular," not only in the visitors' book of the institution, but in their own report. It is a misdemeanor on the part of superintendent or trustees to fail to show the inspectors, and of the inspectors to omit to see, any place or person which it is thus their duty to see! Every medical adviser who resides in or visits an asylum must enter in a case-book the bodily and mental condition of such patient, and what medicine and treatment and at what time he prescribes for him. These books are always inspected, are open to visitors, and frequently copies of them are required by the board. Every letter of an inmate addressed to the board, or to a member of it, must be at once forwarded to its address, unopened; and every other letter, if not forwarded to its address, must be speedily delivered to the inspectors for the board. Every person guilty of neglect or ill treatment of a patient is to be punished as for a misdemeanor. The humanity and justice of such provisions must commend them to the American heart. It is obvious that inspections of all vouchers and accounts by an independent body must tend to economy on the part of

trustees and superintendents, to say nothing of having the expenses of each institution put in comparison with those of others in the annual reports of the board.

Asylums are neither built nor altered in England to suit the fancy of local trustees or superintendents, but upon plans to be approved by central authority, and with stern limitations upon extravagances. The prescriptions of treatment, the diet lists, the suicides, the punishments, the constraints of liberty, the accidents, the ratio of cures and deaths, the conduct of superintendents as shown in the calmness or excitement of their patients, in the different institutions, and the results of looking into the complaints made by letter, appear in these reports and are scored up against an institution according to its merits. It is plain enough that as checks upon arbitrary power, as incentives to justice and economy, and as sources of public enlightenment, such reports must be salutary in the highest degree. By removing secrecy and mystery from asylum management, the action of the board has greatly raised asylum affairs in public estimation. Suspicion and distrust on the subject no longer exist, as in this country, and English and German alienists and statesmen see, with surprise, the dread with which our asylum authorities look upon publicity and investigation. In those countries, such scenes as we witness would be impossible. For example: a great New York asylum superintendent, paid from the public treasury, leaving his patients last winter locked in charge of subordinates, while he visited Albany to lead the asylum influence against a bill for the better protection of the insane; a minister of the Gospel standing but yesterday before the Senate committee before referred to, and holding in his hand a letter from a superintendent over him, which admonished him in direct words that he had passed the asylum locks only on the condition of revealing no secrets, and that he would speak out the facts as to abuses at the peril of his place as a Christian missionary to a public lunatic asylum in the city of New York! Such, in their decisive features, are the widely different systems according to which lunacy affairs have been managed for more than a generation on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. On the one side, the only national organization having been a body made up of superintendents and trustees, interested if not in part formed to preserve them in the exercise of their despotic power against the complaints of its victims and the protests of

the public; on the other side, a body independent of superintendents and trustees alike, and both formed and interested to bring them to the bar of public opinion, and to secure for every lunatic in their care all the comfort and justice which a great nation can supply.

It is not strange that superintendents and trustees oppose such inspection and publicity. But why should they, any more than bank and insurance directors and presidents, be exempt? The wonder is, not that lunacy administration here should be more tyrannical, expensive, and distrusted than in Europe, that physical restraint and punishments should be more frequent and excessive, that suppression of letters and secrecy should be enforced, or that insanity should increase and become incurable in the degree that our asylum management has fallen behind. the science and humanity of the age; but the wonder is that a humane and intelligent people should have so long, with the example of Europe before their eyes, tolerated a system repugnant to their constitutions and national spirit. We may be sure that a system so intrenched in the statutes and in professional, partisan, and local interests all over the country, will not be easily overthrown. But difficult as the work may be, the most essential step toward reform is to open all the asylums, public and private alike, to inspection and reports by an independent board (after the British model), either created separately in each State, or made up of members from several States, for a common duty. Then asylum extravagance, asylum despotism, and asylum politics will fall before public opinion; but not before. All reforms short of this must deal mainly with effects, and not with the real causes of our evils.

DORMAN B. EATON.

VOL. CXXXII.-NO. 292.

19

THE POLITICAL ATTITUDE
ATTITUDE OF THE MORMONS.

To make the position of the Mormons in Utah clear to the general reader; to deal with the subject without prejudice and yet to state the truth, is a difficult undertaking. Toward the United States the Mormon power observes the forms of republican polity, while in fact it is a despotism as absolute in its control over its own people as ever existed on the earth. That such an institution has been able to plant itself in the heart of the United States, to maintain itself, and to steadily increase in power, is one of the anomalies of the times. It reveals, on the one hand, how slow a perfectly free people are to realize when a serious danger threatens them; on the other, what results cunning and unscrupulous leaders may achieve through appeals to men whose minds are clouded by ignorance and steeped in superstition.

Ask nine out of every ten men in the country what there is objectionable in the Mormon faith and in Mormon practices, and the answer will be that polygamy is preached and practiced. That behind polygamy there is in the Mormon creed a deadly menace to free government, few suspect. And yet this is true. The Mormons have a "celestial kingdom of God," and a "kingdom of God on earth." This latter means the rule of its people in temporal things; and the dream of the Mormon leaders is, that under this rule the governments of the earth will one by one be brought, until the whole world shall be subjugated. They teach explicitly that every government framed by man is illegal; declare that their government was given them direct from heaven; that the president and apostles of their church stand on earth the direct vicegerents of the Almighty; and that, by revelations, dreams, and other jugglery, they are at all times endowed with the wisdom to guide their people aright in all things, temporal as well as spiritual. Their leaders claim to be

infallible, not in the sense of a court of last appeal, but as men inspired, who catch the thoughts and pronounce the words of Deity. And the claim is admitted by their followers. With such a belief impressed upon the plastic hearts of children, it is easy to enforce discipline. Then, in worldly knowledge they are instructed very little, the policy of the church being to keep the masses poor and ignorant. They are forbidden to read books or journals that attack their faith or appeal to their reason; while the quality of their own journals will be understood when we mention that, within the past year, they have prescribed as a certain safeguard against, and remedy for, diphtheria and other diseases which come of blood-poisoning, more earnest prayers, more punctual and faithful obedience to the commands of their elders. Naturally, men so enthralled are mere slaves. Their first and only real allegiance is given to their church and chiefs. As between their creed and the government of the United States, the latter is nothing; when any law of the land conflicts with a church rule, the law is held as naught, and, to defeat the execution of such a law, perjury is held to be, instead of a crime, a virtue. Repeated instances of this have been given in the courts of Utah by Mormons, from Brigham Young and Daniel H. Wells down to the herd which live but to obey the orders of the leaders. Dora Young, a daughter of Brigham, who has broken away from the Mormon church, declares that the first thing to open her eyes to the atrocities practiced, under the name of religion, in Utah, was the wholesale perjury resorted to by her father and by others high in authority in the Mormon church, in order to circumvent the laws and to defeat justice.

To the ignorant masses in Utah thousands from Europe are annually added,-creatures who, in their native lands, were so miserable that, finding here a home with plenty of vegetables, fruit, meat, and fish, they are easily impressed with the belief that all this is a direct interposition of divine grace in their behalf. The result is a people who, in their daily lives, are peaceable, industrious, frugal, and courteous, but who, at the command of their leaders, would, in a day, rise up, lay their cities and towns waste, and with their flocks and herds go in search of a new home, north, south, east, or west, as directed; and whether committing atrocities, or themselves perishing from exposure, would say their prayers and sing their hymns in the very ecstasy of fanaticism.