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a State shall be cared for in properly organized and managed hospitals; and yet the principles and policy which it advocates are driving the chronic insane back into county jails and poorhouses, simply because they persist in their adherence to " propositions," framed to meet an entirely different condition of public sentiment of affairs.

It is said that they will cost more for maintenance. I reply, first, that this is not yet proven; and, second, that the cost of maintenance properly includes a reasonable percentage on the original outlay. If the cost of construction can be sufficiently reduced, the cost of maintenance will be less, even if the cash expenditure is slightly more. The difference can be but trifling, in any event; and the Association itself has said, in substance, that no necessary expense for the reasonable comfort and wellbeing of the insane "can be deemed either misplaced or injudicious."

We hope to try this experiment in Illinois; whether we shall or not, remains to be seen. It will depend on the action taken by the General Assembly. If tried and successful, as we trust it may be, it will mark an era in the treatment of the insane in this country.

I should have liked to add a few words on the subjects of moral treatment of insanity, and supervision of insane hospitals; but have exhausted my own time and your patience.

I am, as ever, sincerely yours,

FRED. H. WINES.

DEBATE.

At the conclusion of the reading of Mr. Wines's communication, the Chairman, Mr. Robinson, said that in the main he agreed with the contents of the paper read. He was pleased to see a change of sentiment on the subject of the construction of hospitals for the insane. Men of practical good sense had investigated this subject, and now insisted on a departure from the present system, both for humanitarian and financial reasons; and this unfortunate class of the insane were entitled to a change. There should be separate buildings for the chronic insane, where they could be taken care of in comfort, but at less cost than the curable cases.

The hour being late, and the question having already been somewhat debated under the head of "Insanity," no further remarks were made. It was understood, however, that the new

Committee on Insanity, of which Dr. Earle, one of the oldest members of the Association of Superintendents, is chairman, and Mr. Wines a member, should in 1879 bring forward some practical suggestions in regard to the public care of the chronic insane, upon which it was hoped the next Conference would unite; the controversy upon that question having now proceeded so far as to make such an agreement not only desirable, but possible.

MORNING SESSION.

THURSDAY, May 23, 1878.

The first paper read was a Report on

LABOR, PAUPERISM, AND CRIME.

BY CARROLL D. WRIGHT, CHIEF OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BUREAU of STATISTICS.

It is difficult to define what is meant by the term "labor question." It is so flippantly used that we seem to have an idea of its meaning, but find that idea almost undefinable. If it means any thing in a restricted sense, it is, How can the wage-receiver get the most for time expended? It is, How to feed those who are not fed? It is, How can those who are not capitalists become capitalists, and those who are remain so? If it means any thing in a broad, comprehensive sense, it is, How to give all who labor by physical exertion a better enlightenment and the means to improve their environment; and in this sense it is the question of civilization itself. I prefer to discuss it with reference to pauperism and crime in this latter sense, and as a phase only of our whole civilization; yet it is so broad, has so many ramifications, that for its aims, its work, its character, the American Social Science Association might as well be called the American Association for the Discussion of the Labor Question.

The subject should not be considered as belonging only to these depressed times, the alleged cause of which is alternately found in over-production, under-consumption, labor-saving machinery, the war of the Rebellion, the currency, the greed of capitalists, The causes cannot be formulated.

etc.

The same empiricism which has a cause ready at hand invariably has at hand also a solution of the labor question, and will dog

matically give, as a panacea for all the ills of the workingman, shorter hours of labor, government control of railroads, of industries, of land, the abolition of interest, legally established wages, etc. The solution of the labor question cannot be formulated. As I have said, in another position, it is not solvable; it is like the social question, and must be content to grow towards a higher condition along with the universal progress of education and broadened civilization. Intelligence, resulting from industrial and intellectual education, will produce grand results in the amelioration of unfavorable conditions. The enactment of laws protecting the interests of the laborer, protecting his person from accidents, his rights to the schools for his children (in fact, to drive his children out of manufacturing establishments and into the schools), fostering plans for his securing cheap and comfortable homes, these with other measures are all great helps, but not solutions; they are all elevating, but not concluding influences. So, considering the question as a phase of our whole civilization, it is a part of the Christianity of the world; and the only solution of it is the solution of all questions and phases of questions which make up the sum of Christianity, — education in the whole sense of the word, that is culture, that is qualification, not only in defined knowledge, but in religion, in the broad principle of equity, in loving our neighbors as ourselves. It must take its solution along with and no faster than all the other questions : therefore it is the duty of all right-minded men who have a special interest in or taste for the study of this particular phase to do all in their power to hasten the work, and join hands readily with all faithful men and women in their efforts to settle other vital questions, but bearing in mind in this, as in other matters, that, when a man comes to us with a special cure or panacea for all the ills that beset the workingman, we are quite sure of finding a demagogue.

It is very evident, however, that increased and advanced civilization brings with it increased and advanced legislation; and that the more enlightened the government, or the more nearly the government approaches the absolute expression of the will of the people, the more complicated the machinery by which the government is administered. And more: the higher the type of civilization of a state, the farther out must she reach her arm to take under her protection the waifs of society, the depressed in estate, and the helpless, in all directions.

In the analysis of causes for the existence of the term "labor question," and for whatever bearing it may have upon those twin evils pauperism and crime, I can not do better than to repeat a terse statement made some years ago by Mr. Ira Steward of Massachusetts. He said: "Starting in the labor problem from whatever point we may, we reach, as the ultimate cause of our industrial, social, moral, and material difficulties, the terrible fact of poverty. By poverty we mean something more than pauperism. The latter is a condition of entire dependence upon charity, while the former is a condition of want, of lack, of being without, though not necessarily a condition of complete dependence.”

It is in this view that the proper growth and understanding of the labor question, in its comprehensiveness, and the development of its principles, means the consideration of the abolition of pauperism and the eradication of crime; and the definitions given carry with them all the elements of those great special inquiries embodied in the very existence of our vast charitable, penal, and reformatory institutions. How shall poverty be abolished, and crime be eradicated? The discussion is an old one, and neither modern professional labor reformers nor modern philanthropists have any patents upon the theme. The progress of the world may be read as well by statutes in the humanity of law, by prisons, by charitable institutions, and by the condition of labor, as by written history; for, as the condition of labor rises, pauperism and crime fall in the scale.

To say that pauperism, and maybe crime as an attendant evil, follow the unemployed more mercilessly than the employed, would be to make a statement too simple in its nature to invite serious consideration. Yet the history and statistics of labor and the conclusions resulting, in their relation to pauperism and crime, present many interesting and valuable features. The evils we are considering have always existed, no matter what the social or legal status of men; under the most favorable as well as under the most unfavorable conditions; under liberal and under despotic government; in barbarous and in enlightened lands; with heathenism and with Christianity: and yet pauperism always has been, and is, in a philosophic sense, a rebuke to a people living under constitutional liberty. America has no right, theoretically, to permit its existence; and practically, taking the decades together, it is decreasing. We must not consider this as a question of this year, or of the few years just past, but in its totality as relates to the age of this people.

Employment of the unemployed will not crush pauperism, not even if every able-bodied man in the United States could be furnished with work to-morrow. Universal education will not. The realization of the highest hopes of the temperance and labor reformers will not. The general adoption of the Christian religion will not. But all these grand and divine agencies working together will reduce it to its minimum, and make that community which tolerates it indictable at the bar of public opinion, the most powerful tribunal known. Physical agencies, without all the higher elements, can do but little. The early history of our own country teaches this truth.

In a treatise written by Richard Hakluyt of England, in 1584, on the religious, political, and commercial advantages to be derived by England from the attempted colonization of America, entitled A Discourse on Westerne Plantinge, recently discovered, and published for the first time in 1877, by the Maine Historical Society, the familiar question, how to employ the unemployed, was discussed by the author, and in terms which remind one forcibly of the oft-repeated fears and the chimerical schemes of reformers of this age, when, if what they tell us is true, the social system is surely on the brink of destruction. Well, it always has been; but, like the country after each election, is saved again, no matter what party wins.

In urging upon his government the undertaking of voyages, Hakluyt uses this language (the spelling being modernized), after referring to the prosperity of Spain and Portugal: —

"But we, for all the statutes that hitherto can be devised, and the sharp execution of the same in punishing idle and lazy persons for want of sufficient occasion of honest employment, cannot deliver our Commonwealth from multitudes of loiterers" (tramps, we call them)" and idle vagabonds. Truth it is, that through our long peace and seldom sickness, two singular blessings of Almighty God, we are grown more populous than ever heretofore; so that now there are of every art and science so many that they can hardly live one by another; nay, rather, they are ready to eat up one another; yea, many thousands of idle persons are within this realm, which, having no way to be set on work, be either mutinous and seek alteration in the State, or at least, very burdensome to the Commonwealth, and often fall to pilfering and thieving and other lewdness, whereby all the prisons of the land are daily pestered and stuffed full of them, where either they pitifully pine away,

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