ness was generally admitted; but the measures for the
relief of the unhappy victims were very few, and very ill
judged. Among the ancients, they were brought to the
temples, and subjected to imposing ceremonies, which
were believed supernaturally to relieve them, and which
probably had a favourable influence through their action
upon the imagination. The great Greek physicians had
devoted considerable attention to this malady, and some
of their precepts anticipated modern discoveries; but no
lunatic asylum appears to have existed in antiquity.1 In
the first period of the hermit life, when many anchorites
became insane through their penances, a refuge is said to
have been opened for them at Jerusalem.2 This appears,
however, to be a solitary instance, arising from the exi-
gencies of a single class, and no lunatic asylum existed
in Christian Europe till the fifteenth century. The Ma-
hommedans, in this form of charity, preceded the Chris-
tians. A writer of the seventh century notices the
existence of several of these institutions at Fez, and
mentions that the patients were restrained by chains.3
The asylum of Cairo is said to have been founded in a.D.
1304,4 and it is probable that the care of the insane was
a general form of charity in Mahommedan countries.
Among the Christians it first appeared in quarters con-
tiguous to the Mahommedans; but there is, I think, no
real evidence that it was derived from Mahommedan
example. The Knights of Malta were famous as the one
order who admitted lunatics into their hospitals; but
no Christian asylum expressly for their benefit existed
till 1409. The honour of instituting this form of charity in
Christendom belongs to Spain. A monk named Juan Gila-
See Esquirol, Maladies mentales.

2 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xxxvii.
3 Leo Africanus, quoted by Esquirol.

◄ Desmaisons, Asiles d'Aliénés en Espagne, p. 53.

berto Joffre, filled with compassion at the sight of the maniacs who were hooted by crowds through the streets of Valencia, founded an asylum in that city, and his example was speedily followed in other provinces. In A.D. 1425, an asylum was erected at Saragossa. In A.D. 1436, both Seville and Valladolid followed the example, as did also Toledo, in A.D. 1483. All these institutions existed before a single lunatic asylum had been founded in any other part of Christendom. Two other very honour able facts may be mentioned, establishing the pre-eminence of Spanish charity in this field. The first s, that the oldest lunatic asylum in the metropolis of Catholicism was that erected by Spaniards, in A.D. 1548.2 The second is, that, when at the close of the last century, Pinel began his great labours in this sphere, he pronounced Spain to be the country in which lunatics were treated with most wisdom and most humanity.3

In most countries their condition was indeed truly deplorable. While many thousands were burnt as witches, those who were recognised as insane were compelled to endure all the horrors of the harshest imprisonment. Blows, bleeding, and chains were their usual treatment, and most horrible accounts were given of madmen who had spent decades bound in dark cells.4 The treatment naturally aggravated their malady, and that malady in many cases rendered impossible the resignation and ultimate torpor

'I have taken these facts from a very interesting little work, Desmaisons, Des Asiles d' Aliénés en Espagne; Recherches historiques et médicales (Paris, 1859). Dr. Desmaisons conjectures that the Spaniards took their asylums from the Mahommedans; but, as it seems to me, he altogether fails to prove his point. His work, however, contains much curious information on the history of lunatic asylums.

2

Amydemus, Pietas Romana (Oxford, 1687), p. 21; Desmaisons, p. 108. 3 Pinel, Traité médico-philosophique, pp. 241–242.

* See the dreadful description in Pinel, Traité médico-philosophique sur l'Aliénation mentale (2nd ed.), pp. 200-202.

which alleviate the suffering of ordinary prisoners. Not until the eighteenth century was the condition of this unhappy class seriously improved. The combined progress of theological scepticism and scientific knowledge, relegated witchcraft to the world of phantoms, and the exertions of Morgagni in Italy, of Cullen in Scotland, and of Pinel in France, renovated the whole treatment of acknowledged lunatics.

The second qualification to the admiration with which we regard the history of Christian charity arises from the undoubted fact that a large proportion of charitable institutions have directly increased the poverty they were intended to relieve. The question of the utility and nature of charity is one which, since the modern discoveries of political economy, has elicited much discussion, and in many cases, I think, much exaggeration. What political economy has effected on the subject may be comprised under two heads. It has elucidated more clearly, and in greater detail than had before been done, the effect of provident self-interest in determining the welfare of societies, and it has established a broad distinction between productive and unproductive expenditure. It has shown that, where idleness is supported, idleness will become common; that, where systematic public provision is made for old age, the parsimony of foresight will be neglected; and that therefore these forms of charity, by encouraging habits of idleness and improvidence, ultimately increase the wretchedness they were intended to alleviate. It has also shown that, while expenditure in amusements or luxury, or others of what are called unproductive forms, is undoubtedly beneficial to those who provide them, the fruit perishes in the usage, while the result of productive expenditure, such as that which is devoted to the manufacture of machines, or the improve

ment of the soil, or the extension of commercial enterprise, give a new impulse to the creation of wealth; that the first condition of the rapid accumulation of capital is the diversion of money from unproductive to productive channels, and that the amount of the accumulated capital is one of the two regulating influences of the wages of the labourer. From these positions some persons have inferred that charity should be condemned as a form of unproductive expenditure. But in the first place, all charities that foster habits of forethought and develope new capacities in the poorer classes, such as popular education, or the formation of savings banks, or insurance companies, or, in many cases, small and discriminating loans, or measures directed to the suppression of dissipation, are in the strictest sense productive; and the same may be said of many forms of employment, given in exceptional crises through charitable motives; and in the next place, it is only necessary to remember that the happiness of mankind, to which the accumulation of wealth should only be regarded as a means, is the real object of charity, and it will appear that many forms which are not strictly productive, in the commercial sense, are in the highest degree conducive to this end, and have no serious counteracting evil. In the alleviation of those sufferings that do not spring either from improvidence or from vice, the warmest as well as the most enlightened charity will find an ample sphere for its exertions.1 Blindness, and other exceptional calamities, against the effects of which prudence does not and cannot provide,

1 Malthus, who is sometimes, though most unjustly, described as an enemy to all charity, has devoted an admirable chapter (On Population, book iv. ch. ix.) to the direction of our charity;' but the fullest examination of this subject with which I am acquainted is the very interesting work of Duchâtel, Sur la Charité.

the miseries resulting from epidemics, from war, from famine, from the first sudden collapse of industry, produced by new inventions or changes in the channels of commerce; hospitals, which, besides other advantages, are the greatest schools of medical science, and withdraw from the crowded alley multitudes who would otherwise form centres of contagion-these, and such as these, will long tax to the utmost the generosity of the wealthy; while, even in the spheres upon which the political economist looks with the most unfavourable eye, exceptional cases will justify exceptional assistance. The charity which is pernicious is commonly not the highest but the lowest kind. The rich man, prodigal of money, which is to him of little value, but altogether incapable of devoting any personal attention to the object of his alms, often injures society by his donations; but this is rarely the case with that far nobler charity which makes men familiar with the haunts of wretchedness, and follows the object of its care through all the phases of his life. The question of the utility of charity is simply a question of ultimate consequences. Political economy has no doubt laid down some general rules of great value on the subject; but yet, the pages which Cicero devoted to it nearly two thousand years ago might have been written by the most enlightened modern economist; and it will be continually found that the Protestant lady, working in her parish, by the simple force of common sense and by a scrupulous and minute attention to the condition and character of those whom she relieves, is unconsciously illustrating with perfect accuracy the enlightened charity of Malthus.

But in order that charity should be useful, it is essential that the benefit of the sufferer should be a real object to the donor; and a very large proportion of the evils that have arisen from catholic charity may be traced