ENDS AND .MEANS
of their practical value, to the solution of social and medical
problems regarded before that time as completely insoluble.
It was only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that
it began to be realized that such problems—the problem
of the insane, the problem of the criminal, the problem of
the 'savage'—were insoluble only because violence had
made them so. Thus, the cruel treatment of the insane
resulted in their disease being aggravated and becoming
incurable. It was not until 1792 that Pinel struck the
chains from the unhappy inmates of the Salpetriere. In
1815 a committee of the House of Commons investigated
the state of Bethlehem Hospital and found it appalling.
Bedlam was a place of filth and squalor, with dungeons,
chains and torture chambers. As late as 1840 the great
majority of asylums in Western Europe were still prisons
and their inmates were still being treated as though they
were criminals. Towards the middle of the century a
considerable effort at reform was made and, since then,
doctors have come to rely in their treatment more and-
more upon kindness and intelligent sympathy, less and less
upon harshness and constraint. For a full and very vivid
account of life in a well-run modern hospital for the
insane, W. B. Seabrook's Asylum may be recommended.
Compare this testimony with the description of life in the
Salpetriere before Pinel's day or in unreformed Bedlam.
The difference is the difference between organized violence
and organized, non-violence.
The story of prison reform is essentially similar to that
of the reform of asylums. When John Howard began his
investigations in the middle of the seventies of the
eighteenth century the only decent prisons in Europe were
those of Amsterdam. (Significantly enough, there was
much less crime in Holland than in other countries.)
Prisons were houses of torture in which the innocent
were demoralized and the criminal became more criminal
142,