[135] "If it be true that oppression makes a _wise_ man mad, is it to be supposed that stripes and insults and injuries, for which the receiver knows no cause, are calculated to make a _mad_ man wise? or would they not exasperate his disease and excite his resentment" ("Description of the Retreat," 1813, p. 144). [136] Including cases in seclusion. [137] "Description of the Retreat," S. Tuke. [138] A Savoy physician who dedicated the second edition of his "La Philosophie de la Folie," published in 1804, to Pinel. M. Brierre de Boismont thinks the latter guilty of "the conspiracy of silence" in not mentioning him in his work, but I do not think the conspiracy is proved. [139] See Appendix C. CHAPTER IV. COURSE OF LUNACY LEGISLATION. I now resume the thread of my history at the time of the exposure of the abuses at the old York Asylum. We have already intimated that the treatment adopted at the Retreat, and made known to the public by various writers and by many visitors, but more especially by the "Description," exerted a remarkable influence on the subsequent inquiry and legislation. The success of the Retreat excited the jealousy and antipathy of the superintendent of the York Asylum; the discussion which ensued led to investigation; the revelations which followed excited public opinion; the representatives of the people undertook an inquiry by means of a Select Committee, which finally necessitated legislation, and this legislation by successive enactments wrought the wondrous and beneficial change which we now witness. This sequence of events will be found to be borne out by facts, by any one who will investigate the literature of lunacy from 1792 to the present time. Sydney Smith says, writing in 1817,[140] that "the new Establishment began the great revolution upon this subject, which we trust the provisions of Parliament will complete.... In the course of a few years the Institution had done so much by gentle methods, that a modest and well-written volume, giving an account of it, excited universal interest, and, in fact, achieved what all the talents and public spirit of Mason and his friends had failed to accomplish. It had still better effects. A very inoffensive passage in this book roused, it seems, the animosity of the physician to the York Lunatic Asylum, and a letter which this gentleman published in one of the York newspapers, became the origin of a controversy among the governors of that establishment, which terminated in August, 1814, after a struggle of nearly two years, in the complete overthrow of the old system, and the dismission of every officer of the asylum, except the physician himself. The period is not remote when lunatics were regarded as beings unsusceptible of mental enjoyment or of bodily pain, and accordingly consigned without remorse, to prisons under the name of mad-houses--in the contrivance of which nothing seems to have been considered, but how