"Forty male lunatics out of 1464 then resident were in _camisole_ (strait-waistcoats), some being also otherwise restrained, thereby giving an individual in restraint to every 33-1/4 male inmates, or three per hundred. Amongst the female lunatics, again, the proportion was somewhat larger, 72 persons of that sex, out of the total 1902 resident patients, being under medical coercion; thus making one female in restraint to every 26-1/3 inmates, or at the rate of 3·78 per cent. In contrast with this report respecting the above-named French provincial asylums, I would now place an official statement of the practice pursued at Bethlehem Hospital during the same period. At this establishment, where formerly the strait-waistcoat, with various kinds of personal coercion, were even in greater use than on the other side of the Channel, _not one_ insane patient, among an average population of 391 lunatics, was under constraint of any description during the five weeks ending the 25th of September, when I first visited that institution after my return from the Continent, and which embraced the whole time referred to in this memorandum." From these curious facts it will be seen that we are far in advance of our French, and, we may also add, of our other continental neighbours.[19] When the beneficent thought struck the great Pinel to knock off the fetters of the English captain, he sounded a note which reverberated through Europe, and the poor insane captives issued from their dungeons in which they had been so long immured as the prisoners emerge from their prison to the divine strains of Beethoven's "Fidelio." But when this vast step was accomplished there still remained an immense amount of coercion scarcely less injurious than the old darkness and chains, and to Englishmen is mainly due the credit of abolishing it. Nor shall we rest where we are. It is our belief as well as our hope that, before another generation has gone by, the last vestige of restraint, in the shape of dismal airing-courts, and outside walls, which serve to wound the spirit rather than to enslave the limbs, will pass for ever among us, and only be remembered with the hobbles and the manacles of the past. It has been asserted by some psychologists that lunacy is on the increase, and that its rapid development of late years has been consequent upon the increased activity of the national mind. This statement is certainly startling and calculated to arrest the attention of all thoughtful men. Is it true that civilisation has called to life a monster such as that which appalled Frankenstein? Is it a necessity of progress that it shall ever be accompanied by that fearful black rider which, like Despair, sits behind it? Does mental development mean increased mental decay? If these questions were truly answered in the affirmative, we might indeed sigh for the golden time when "Wild in woods the noble savage ran,"