persons have gone insane on the subject, and are confined in asylums in the United States; but careful inquiry, made in consequence, has happily disproved the statement, and we learn that the amount of insanity produced from this cause is almost insignificant—much less than that caused by religious excitement.
Looking broadly at the facts which force themselves upon our attention, we may say that a study of the relation between modern life and insanity shows that it is of a many-sided and complex character; that the rich and the poor, from different causes, though certainly in one respect the same cause, labor under a large amount of preventable lunacy; that beer and gin, mal-nutrition, a dreary monotony of toil, muscular exhaustion, domestic distress, misery and anxiety, account largely, not only for the number of the poor who become insane in adult life, but who, from hereditary predisposition, are born weak-minded or actually idiotic; that among the middle classes, stress of business, excessive competition, failures, and, also in many cases, reckless and intemperate living, occasion the attack; while in the upper classes intemperance still works woe—and under this head must be comprised lady and gentlemen dipsomaniacs who are not confined in asylums; that while multiplicity of subjects of study in youth and excessive brain-work in after-life exert a certain amount of injurious influence, under-work, luxurious habits, undisciplined wills, desultory life, produce a crop of nervous disorders, terminating not unfrequently in insanity. In a state of civilization like ours, it must also happen that many children of extremely feeble mental as well as bodily constitutions will be reared who otherwise would have died. These either prove to be imbeciles, or they grow up only to fall a prey to the upsetting influence of the cares and anxieties of the world. A considerable number of insane persons have never been really whole-minded people; there has, it will be found on careful inquiry, been always something a little peculiar about them, and when their past life is interpreted by the attack which has rendered restraint necessary, it is seen that there had been a smouldering fire in the constitution for a lifetime, though now, for the first time, bursting forth into actual conflagration.
Lastly, modern society comprises a numerous class of persons, well-meaning, excitable, and morbidly sensitive. Some of these are always on the border-land between sanity and insanity, and their friends are sometimes tempted to wish that they would actually cross the line, and save them from constant harass. When they do, it is easier to make allowance for them and their vagaries.
Whatever uncertainty there may attach to some aspects of this inquiry, unquestionable conclusions have been drawn; and, if these only accord with results arrived at from other considerations, they are valuable as confirming them. Had there appeared to be among the poor and ignorant a striking immunity from attacks of insanity,
