"I concur fully in the sentiments entertained by you in relation to this unwise, not to say inhuman, provision of our law (see Rev. Stat. 382) authorizing the commitment of lunatics to our jails and houses of correction. Our jails preclude occupation, and our houses of correction cannot admit of that variety of pursuit, and its requisite supervision, so indispensable to these unfortunates. Indeed, this feature of our law seems to me a relic of that ancient barbarism which regarded misfortune as a crime, and those bereft of reason as also bereft of all sensibility, as having forfeited not only all title to compassion, but to humanity, and consigned them without a tear of sympathy, or twinge of remorse, or even a suspicion of injustice, to the companionship of the vicious, the custody of the coarse and ignorant, and the horrors of the hopeless dungeon. I cannot persuade myself that anything more than a motion by any member of our Legislature is necessary to effect an immediate repeal of this odious provision."

The sheriff of Berkshire says, conclusively, that "jails and houses of correction cannot be so managed as to render them suitable places of confinement for that unfortunate class of persons who are the subjects of your inquiries, and who, never having violated the law, should not be ranked with felons or confined within the same walls with them. Jailers and overseers of houses of correction, whenever well qualified for the management of criminals, do not usually possess those peculiar qualifications required in those to whom should be intrusted the care of lunatics."

A letter from the surgeon and physician of the Prison Hospital at Cambridge, whose observation and experience have laid the foundation of his opinions, and who hence has a title to speak with authority, affords the following views: "On this subject, it seems to me, there can be but one opinion. No one can be more impressed than I am with the great injustice done to the insane by confining them in jails and houses of correction. It must be revolting to the better feelings of every one to see the innocent and unfortunate insane occupying apartments with or consigned to those occupied by the criminal. Some of the insane are conscious of the circumstances in which they are placed, and feel the degradation. They exclaim sometimes in their ravings, and sometimes in their lucid intervals, "What have I done that I must be shut up in jail?" and "Why do you not let me out?" This state of things unquestionably retards the recovery of the few who do recover their reason under such circumstances, and

may render those permanently insane who under other circumstances might have been restored to their right mind. There is also in our jails very little opportunity for the classification of the insane. The quiet and orderly must in many cases occupy the same rooms with the restless and noisy,-another great hindrance to recovery.

"Injustice is also done to the convicts: it is certainly very wrong that they should be doomed day after day and night after night to listen to the ravings of madmen and madwomen. This is a kind of punishment that is not recognized by our statutes, and is what the criminal ought not to be called upon to undergo. The confinement of the criminal and of the insane in the same building is subversive of that good order and discipline which should be observed in every well-regulated prison. I do most sincerely hope that more permanent provision will be made for the pauper insane by the State, either to restore Worcester Insane Asylum to what it was originally designed to be or else make some just appropriation for the benefit of this very unfortunate class of our 'fellow-beings."'"

From the efficient sheriff of Middlesex County I have a letter upon this subject, from which I make such extracts as my limits permit: "I do not consider it right, just, or humane, to hold for safe keeping, in the county jails and houses of correction, persons classing as lunatics or idiots. Our prisons are not constructed with a view to the proper accommodation of this class of persons. Their interior arrangements are such as to render it very difficult, if not impossible, to extend to such persons that care and constant oversight which their peculiarly unfortunate condition absolutely demands; and, besides, the occupation of prisons for lunatics is unquestionably subversive of discipline, comfort; and good order. Prisoners are thereby subjected to unjust aggravation of necessary confinement by being exposed to an almost constant disquiet from the restless or raving lunatic. You inquire whether 'it may not justly be said that the qualifications for wardenship, or for the offices of overseer, do not usually embrace qualifications for the management of lunatics, whether regarded as curable or incurably lost to reason,' and also whether 'the government of jails and houses of correction for the detention or punishment of offenders and criminals can suitably be united with the government and discipline fitted for the most unfortunate and friendless of the human race; namely, pauper lunatics and idiots, a class not condemned

by the laws, and I must add not mercifully protected by them.' The first of the preceding questions I answer in the affirmative, the last negatively.". [Here follow similar testimonies from the warden of the Cambridge prison, the sheriff of Dukes County, the warden of the prison at South Boston, and the master of the Plymouth almshouse.]

It is not few, but many, it is not a part, but the whole, who bear unqualified testimony to this evil. A voice strong and deep comes up from every almshouse and prison in Massachusetts where the insane are or have been protesting against such evils as have been illustrated in the preceding pages.

Gentlemen, I commit to you this sacred cause. Your action upon this subject will affect the present and future condition of hundreds and of thousands.

In this legislation, as in all things, may you exercise that "wisdom which is the breath of the power of God."

Respectfully submitted,

85 MT. VERNON STREET, BOSTON.

January, 1843

D. L. DIX.

Few lives have been more heroic or more fruitful in the achievement of beneficent results than that of Dorothea Dix. Few things in the history of reform offer such encouragement as the comparison of the evils which she found and exposed in a State like Massachusetts only two generations ago and the condition of the care of the criminal and defective classes by the State to-day. With the terrible evils which yet remain, the progress in this field in America and Europe has been immense. The picture given in the accompanying Memorial of 1843 helps us in some measure to estimate how great is the advance.

Dorothea Lynde Dix was born in Hampden, Me., in 1802; but her childhood was largely passed in Worcester and Boston, Mass. When only fourteen, she opened a school for little children in Worcester. Afterwards she taught in Boston, and in the summer of 1827, and afterwards, had charge in Boston and at Newport of the education of the children of Dr. Channing, whose friendship became one of her chief supports. She accompanied Dr. Channing's household for a winter in the West Indies. In 1836, broken down by too strenuous school work, she went to England, remaining chiefly at Liverpool for eighteen months, when she returned to Boston.

In the spring of 1841 Miss Dix had her sympathy aroused by accounts of the hardships and sufferings of the women in the East Cambridge House of Correction, and she at once volunteered to go regularly on Sundays to give them instruction. Among the prisoners she found a few insane persons, in a cold room with no stove; and, after the jailer's refusal to provide a fire, she appealed to the Court, then in session at East Cambridge, and her request was granted. "It was thus that in the East Cambridge jail Miss Dix was first brought into immediate contact with the overcrowding, filth, and herding together of the innocent, guilty, and insane persons, which at that time characterized the prisons of Massachusetts, and the inevitable evils of which were repeated in even worse shape in the almshouses." She succeeded in enlisting the aid of Rev. Robert C. Waterston, Dr. Samuel G. Howe, and Charles Sumner. Dr. Howe made a careful examination, and published his results in the Boston Advertiser. His article was fircely attacked, but Charles Sumner wrote, "Your article presents a true picture," adding corroborative details of his own investigations. "Was the state of things in the East Cambridge jail an exception, or did it simply exemplify the rule throughout the whole Commonwealth? This was the painful question now raised in the mind of Miss Dix, to an unmistakable answer to which she resolutely devoted the next two years, visiting every jail and almshouse from Berkshire to Cape Cod." It was the results of these investigations which she embodied in the Memorial to

the Massachusetts Legislature, in January, 1843, reprinted in the present leaflet,-a Me morial dated, it will be noted, at No. 85 Mount Vernon Street, Boston, the home of Dr. Channing. The Memorial produced a profound sensation. Humane people pronounced it incredible, and officials denounced it as sensational and slanderous lies." The controversy in the newspapers and elsewhere was hot and bitter; but the arraignment stood. Dr. Channing, Horace Mann, John G. Palfrey, and Dr. Luther V. Bell of the McLean Asylum rallied to her side. The Legislature referred her Memorial to a committee, of which Dr. Samuel G. Howe was appointed chairman, and which made a report strongly indorsing Miss Dix's statements and fortifying them with other instances of similar outrages on humanity. A bill for immediate relief was carried by a large majority, and the order passed for providing accommodations at Worcester for two hundred additional insane persons.

Experiences in Rhode Island and Connecticut convinced Miss Dix that all over the United States existed conditions as bad as she had found in Massachusetts, or worse. "Now first broke upon her the length and breadth of the mission to which she felt herself divinely called. Resolutely and untiringly, State by State, would she take up the work, first exhaustively accumulating the facts, and then besieging the various legislatures till they should capitulate to the cry of the perishing within their borders."

The story of her lifetime of almost incredible labors and accomplishments, in a score of our own States, in Canada, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, in England and Scotland, in the Channel Islands, and on the Continent of Europe, is told by Rev. Francis Tiffany in his "Life of Dorothea Lynde Dix," to which the student is referred. As Mr. Tiffany justly says, "the repetition of her achievements year by year, the enormous sums of money they involved, the magnitude of the structures they led to the building of, the range of the field they opened out to advancing medical science, and the vast numbers of poor wretches transferred from stalls and chains to a comparative heaven of asylum comfort, fairly startle the imagination." She obtained "larger appropriations for purely benevolent purposes than probably it was ever given to any other mortal in the old world or the new to raise."

During the Civil War she was Superintendent of Women Nurses for the Union armies. The flags presented her by the War Department in recognition of her services now hang in the Memorial Hall at Harvard University. She raised the money for the monument to the fallen soldiers in the National Cemetery at Hampton, Va. "The first object visible over the low level of the peninsula to vessels coming in from sea to the Roads, it stands the reverential tribute of a heroic woman to the heroic men she honored with all her soul." After the war she took up once again her old prison and asylum work. Two asylums in Japan were added to the thirty-two she had already been the instrument of founding or greatly enlarging. She was accustomed to mark each one on a map with the sign of the cross. After the great Chicago fire of 1871 and the Boston fire of 1872, she was active in those places in the relief of suffering. To animals as well as men her sympathy went out. She projected a drinking-fountain in a crowded part of Boston, where she had noticed the hard labor of the horses; and Whittier wrote this inscription:

Stranger and traveller,
Drink freely and bestow
A kindly thought on her

Who bade this fountain flow,
Yet hath for it no claim

Save as the minister

Of blessing in God's name."

She died in 1887, at the State Asylum, Trenton, N.J., which she had founded, and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, near Boston.

FROM THE CHAPTER PREPARED BY GENERAL ARMSTRONG IN 1890 FOR THE VOLUME "TWENTY-TWO YEARS' WORK OF THE HAMPTON INSTITUTE."

It meant something to the Hampton School, and perhaps to the ex-slaves of America, that from 1820 to 1860, the distinctively missionary period, there was worked out in the Hawaiian Islands the problem of the emancipation, enfranchisement, and Christian civilization of a dark-skinned Polynesian people in many respects like the negro race.

From 1831 my parents, Richard Armstrong, of Pennsylvania, and Clarissa Chapman, of Massachusetts, were missionaries, till my father's appointment, in 1847, as Minister of Public Instruction, when he took charge of, and in part built up, the five hundred Hawaiian free schools and some of the higher educational work, until his death in 1860.

Born there in 1839, and leaving the country in 1860 to complete my education under Dr. Mark Hopkins at Williams College, Mass., I had distinct impressions of the people, of the work for them and its results. Let me say here that whatever good teaching I may have done has been Mark Hopkins teaching through me. On horseback and canoe tours with my father and alone, around those grandly picturesque volcanic islands, inspecting schools and living much among the natives (then generally Christianized), I noticed how easily the children learned from books,