In a case which came under our knowledge, a patient imagined that the text, "If thine eye offend thee pluck it out," was literally intended, and, after various attempts to comply with the command, he succeeded in destroying the sight of one orbit. Such instances are rare, but the medical man should at all times be prepared to meet them, instead of folding his arms and looking helplessly on whilst the mischief is being done, through a craven fear of the non-restraint cry. The strait-waistcoat is certainly liable to great abuse, but less than the padded room, which may be converted into a cruel means of coercion in the hands of unwatched attendants. There yet remains a vast amount of restraint, which is almost as irritating, if not so strongly reprobated, as the implements which bind the limbs of the suicidal or violent. Restraint is only comparative. The strait-waistcoat is the narrowest zone of confinement, and the padded room but a little wider. Next to these comes the locked gallery for a class, then the encircling high wall for the entire lunatic community; and lastly, that aërial barrier the parole, for those who can be trusted to go beyond the asylum. The efforts of philanthropists will not, we are convinced, cease, until all the methods of confinement, down to the parole, are removed; or at least so disguised as to hinder their present irritating action upon the inmates. As long as the chief idea in connection with these establishments is that they are receptacles for the _detention_ of the insane, so long perhaps the means taken to prevent flight will obtain; but when they are simply regarded as hospitals for the cure of mental disease, we shall witness the abandonment of many arrangements which are as barbarous and ineffectual as the cruelties practised in the last century. The asylums where the restraint is greatest are precisely those from which the largest number of patients contrive to escape; whereas, when restrictions of all kinds are abolished, as at the insane pauper colony of Gheel, in Belgium, but few persons ever attempt to get away. In former days the public were admitted to perambulate Bedlam on the payment of twopence. A writer in the _World_ gives a narrative of a visit to it in Easter-week, 1753, when he found there a hundred holiday-makers, who "were suffered unattended to run rioting up and down the wards, making sport of the miserable inhabitants." Richardson, the novelist, had, a few years earlier, depicted the scene in the assumed character of a young lady from the country, describing to her friends the sights of London.