gives to them certain privileges,-ballot-boxes-juries,—and cries, "Peace, be still!" but still they come, "creeping, creeping everywhere," and crying for they know not what. Democracy finally throws down all the political barriers, abolishes all legal distinctions, yields the whole field of state, and bids them in God's name to vote, and vote, to their heart's content, but only to leave Mammon and respectability quiet in their possession; but still they come, no longer creeping, but standing erect, asserting their birthright, rejecting all messes of pottage, and claiming BROTHERHOOD.

This principle may be illustrated by the history of any social institution. Take the punishment of crime, for instance. Once, whoever offended against the "powers that be" was instantly beaten, branded, maimed, killed, without other warrant than the temper of the tyrant. Little by little it was found necessary to make some show of proof, though it were only the thumb-screw, pincers, or wheel. This would not do very long, and it was found that the man must be tried before even the lord could mutilate or hang him. Soon it was found that only his peers could judge of his guilt, and then juries were organ

ized.

The kind of punishment too, must be modified; a man must not be drawn and quartered, disembowelled, hung in chains, or even hung by a rope like a dog, but shut up in prison.

But the prison, too, must be modified. At first they were only receptacles into which could be thrown the nuisances that came between the wind and the noses of nobility or property; common-sewers, in which, if only out of sight, the poor and ignorant might breed mutual corruption. This could not be endured, and so prisoners were made cleanly, orderly, and industrious, but still regarded as worthless wretches, to be punished with stripes and privations, blows upon the body and blows upon the soul. But this could not be tolerated; and at last humanity comes "creeping, creeping," and crying"Make your prisons moral hospitals; strive to cure as well as punish our sons and brothers, or your granite and iron shall fare as did the stone walls and steel armor of feudalism."

Strange how men, reading the lessons of the past, can be heedless of the cries and demands of humanity in the present! but so it ever is. Nobility in his saddle, Aristocracy in his coach, Respectability in his gig, Property in his counting-room, Propriety in his pew, ever have, and still do cry, "Peace, be still!" when the poor and lowly strive to struggle up a step higher upon the platform of humanity.

The foremost countries in the world (and Massachusetts is one of them,) are, however, beginning to heed the warning of the past, and the threatening of the future. Some of the claims of the poorer classes are beginning to be understood and granted, though still too much as boons, rather than rights. The time was when colleges were considered as all that was necessary for national education; the time has come when the Common School is considered still more necessary; and the time is at hand when universities for the rich alone shall dwindle into insignificance compared with the vast machinery which shall be put in operation for the education of the children of the poorest citizens. The pay of the dismissed soldier, and the honor now paid to his tawdry tinsel, shall go to encourage and elevate the teacher; and the hulks of navies shall be left to rot, that the school-house may be built up and adorned.

In the way, too, of what is called charity, but which should be called religion and duty, we are advancing. The time was when deformed children were exposed and left to perish; a Taygetus and Eurotas were everywhere at hand for those who could not be reared to beauty and strength; but now, the more deformed they are the more solicitude is manifested in their behalf. The sick are gathered into hospitals, the dumb are taught to speak, the blind to read, the insane to reason, and at last the poor idiot is welcomed into the human family.

We do not propose to write a disquisition upon Idiocy—much less upon the means that should be used to improve the subject of it; but we would utter some thoughts suggested by reading the books at the head of our article, and especially by an examination of the statistics recently collected by the Commissioners appointed by the Legislature of Massachusetts.

The seed of our thought is this great truth-that the mental and moral condition of men is made by nature to be mainly dependent upon the structure and condition of their bodily organization; the fruit, is the sad conviction that this truth is overlooked or disregarded among us. The reports of the Commissioners show clearly that the vast majority of cases of insanity, imbecility, and idiocy, are traceable to palpable and outrageous violations of the laws of physiology. And yet the venerable and astute Senators of Massachusetts, at this very session, vetoed a project for favoring the introduction of more general knowledge of those laws in the community! They can protect pigeon-beds, encourage alewife-fisheries, and push rail-roads; the people, it would seem, need encouragement in

that line but as for physiology, they need no knowledge of that!

Now, will it be believed in the face of all this, that in our Commonwealth there are over one thousand men and women in a state of deplorable idiocy; one thousand beings in the form of humanity, but shorn of all its glorious attributes and this mainly because their parents ignored the laws of physiology! Yet such is the case, beyond all question. Now, if we add to these sufferers the greater number of the insane; the still greater one of helpless paupers; the blind, the deaf and dumb, and that class whose name is legion, and which outnumbers all the rest put together the drunkards, what a fearful load of unfortunate and degraded dependents do we find that society has to carry; and what a serious drawback must it be to any progress.

We speak within bounds when we say, that there are over ten thousand wretched and helpless creatures of the classes alluded to in this our fair Commonwealth. And if so many here, then what must be the case elsewhere?

Great as this standing army of unfortunates is, we could better afford to support it than to maintain as many mail-clad warriors; indeed, the burden they impose upon society comes not in the shape of money; it is felt in a more dreadful form. Each century's experience is bringing home with ever increas ing force the truth, that society is a unit. God willed that there should be community of interest among men; He affixed dreadful penalties to the violation of His will, and all the ef forts of the upper ten, or ten thousand, to walk on the heads of the multitude, are unavailing. There is not a spot on the globe where a man can find means to enjoy his riches and his culture beyond the reach of the troubles occasioned by the ignorance and degradation in which the mass of the people may be left. And it ought so to be, for otherwise the favored few will neglect the laboring many. Ignorance, intemperance, crime, brutality, dirt, vulgarity, are all around us and in our very midst; they breed moral as well as physical pests; they are contagious, and we ourselves, or more probably our chil dren, may become infected by them unless we see to it that they are cured. Now the cure must be radical, and it must be undertaken by the more intelligent and wealthy class. Nothing short of this will answer.. We may cut off a diseased or cancerous limb, but we cannot cut off the people, for they are the body social.

Some remarks in the Commissioners' report are pertinent to this subject; it says,

"In some families which are degraded by drunkenness and vice, there is a degree of combined ignorance and depravity, which disgraces humanity. It is not wonderful that feeble-minded children are born in such families; or, being born, that many of them become idiotic. Out of this class domestics are sometimes taken by those in better circumstances, and they make their employers feel the consequences of suffering ignorance and vice to exist in the community. There are cases recorded in the appendix, where servant-women, who had the charge of little girls, deliberately taught them habits of self-abuse, in order that they might exhaust themselves, and go to sleep quietly! This has happened out of the almshouses, as well as in them; and such little girls have become idiotic!

The mind instinctively recoils from giving credit to such atrocious guilt; nevertheless, it is there with all its hideous consequences; and no hiding of our eyes, no wearing of rose-colored spectacles, nothing but looking at it in its naked deformity, will ever enable men to cure it. There is no cordon sanitaire for vice; we cannot put it into quarantine, nor shut it up in a hospital; if we allow its existence in our neighbourhood, it poisons the very air which our children breathe."

There it is! that is the doctrine! we have got to look at it in that light, and treat it as a matter which affects us and our children, before we shall be moved to cure it. In another part of the report it is said, that

"The moral evils resulting from the existence of a thousand and more of such persons in the community are still greater than the physical ones. The spectacle of human beings reduced to a state of brutishness, and given up to the indulgence of animal appetites and passions, is not only painful, but demoralizing in the last degree. Not only young children, but children of an older growth' are most injuriously affected by it. What virtuous parent could endure the thought of a beloved child living within the influence of an idiotic man or woman who knows none of the laws of conscience and morality, and none even of the requirements of decency? And yet, most of the idiots in our Commonwealth, unless absolutely caged up, (as a few are) have, within their narrow range, some children who may mock them indeed, and tease them, but upon whom they in return inflict a more serious and lasting evil. Every such person is like an Upas tree, that poisons the whole moral atmosphere about him."

Yes! the spectacle of a man created in God's image, but made brutish and brutal by being given over to his appetites and passions, must ever be demoralizing to all who witness it; and this spectacle, multiplied as it is in our State a thousand times, and presented daily and hourly to thousands of our cit izens, is doubtless hurtful in a high degree.

But, there is even more dreadful import in this than at first appears; for these thousand senseless human beings, who are utterly dependent upon others, who are regarded as irresponsible by the law, who may commit even murder without legal or moral guilt, are only the occupants of the lowest rank in the social scale. Rising above them, little by little, are other ranks, up to the high platform upon which stand our most gifted and best educated men and women. In the rank next above the idiot stand those helpless creatures who are supposed to know right from wrong, and from whom are drafted almost all the tenants of our jails and prisons. It is a feaful question whether most of this class, though rising above mental idiocy, are not still in a state of moral idiocy; whether, by the necessity of the case, by the operation of our social system, they are not born in sin, nurtured in ignorance, and trained in depravity, so as to be certainly and necessarily predestined to the prison and the almshouse.

We are not of that school of philosophy which teaches that all offences against human and divine laws are the necessary consequences of a vicious organization, which irresistibly impels the offender into crime and sin; but we cannot shut our eyes to the facts that are pressing with increasing force every day, and which tend to show that a very large class of criminals are made so by causes altogether beyond their control.

Quetelet and others have shown, beyond all possibility of doubt, that, certain data being given, such as the religion, the education, the material condition, and the population of a country the number and even the kind of crimes that will be committed in a given time may be calculated with as much certainty as the number of deaths. A farmer who has ten thousand apple-trees, cannot tell you with half so much certainty the quantity and quality of fruit that they will bear next year, as a statist can tell you the number and kind of crimes that will be committed next year in a community of ten million persons.

The more closely the great principles which govern the actions of men are studied, the more clearly is it seen that cer