ed the pages of history, and whose doings in our day
contribute so largely to the awful calendar of crime which blackens
and spreads with gore the pages of our public press.

We may cherish the sentiment that it were base cowardice to lay hand
upon the lunatic save in kindness; and yet restrain him from himself
and the community from him. We may couple his restraints with the
largest liberty compatible with his welfare and ours; we may not
always abolish the bolts and bars, indeed we cannot, either to his
absolute personal liberty in asylums or to his entire moral freedom
without their walls, yet we may keep them largely out of sight. Let
him be _manacled when he must and only when he must_, and then only
with silken cords bound by affectionate hands, and not by chains.
We may not open all the doors, indeed we cannot, but we can and do,
thanks to the humanitarian spirit of the age in which we live, open
many of them and so shut them, when it must need be done, that they
close for _his_ welfare and ours only; that he may not feel that hope
is gone or humanity barred out with the shutting of the door that
separates him from the world.

We may not always swing the door of the lunatic as facilely outward as
inward--the nature of his malady will not always admit of this--but we
should do it whenever we can, and never, when we must, should we
close it harshly. And while we must needs narrow his liberty among
ourselves, we should enlarge it in the community to which his
affliction assigns him, to the fullest extent permissible by the
nature of his malady.

Liberty need not necessarily be denied him; and to the glory of our
age it is not in the majority of American asylums for the insane,
because the conditions under which he may safely enjoy liberty, to
his own and the community's welfare, are changed by disease. The free
sunlight and the fresh air belong as much to him in his changed mental
estate as to you or me, and more, because his affliction needs their
invigorating power, and the man who would chain, in this enlightened
age, an insane man in a dungeon, because he is diseased and
troublesome or dangerous, would be unworthy the name of human.
Effective restraint may be employed without the use of either iron
manacles or dismal light and air excluding dungeons.

The insane man is one of our comrades who has fallen mentally maimed
in the battle of life. It may be our turn next to follow him to the
rear; but because we