“Such arbitrary courses have an ill operation upon the courage of a nation, by embasing the hearts of the people. A servile condition does, for the most part, beget in men a slavish temper and disposition. Those that live so much under the whip and the pillory, and such servile engines as were frequently used by the Earl of Strafford, they may have the dregs of valour, sullenness, and stubbornness which may make them prone to mutinies and discontents. Shall it be treason to embase the king’s coin, though but a piece of twelve pence, or six pence? and must it not needs be the effect of a greater treason to embase the spirits of his subjects, and to set a stamp and character of servitude upon them whereby they shall be disabled to do anything for the service of the king and commonwealth?”—Pym’s Speech on the Trial of the Earl of Strafford. Footnote 89: In a letter to the _Lancet_, a gentleman signing himself Stanley Haynes, M.D., suggests that the Government should erect vast establishments, to which “all persons ill with scarlatina, measles, roseola, variola, varicella, relapsing fever, typhus, enteric, or yellow fevers, diphtheria, pertussis, or cholera,” should be conveyed in spite of any remonstrances or resistance to the contrary; such establishments to be for all classes, and the removal of the patients to be insisted on, “whenever the medical officer of health is satisfied that isolation and disinfection will not be complete at home,”—even in this latter case the sick-rooms at home to be entered only by persons authorized by an officer of health. The writer says that this system “would be equal to the beneficial extension of the Contagious Diseases Acts to eruptive, continued, and mucous fevers.” He suggests that “much opposition would undoubtedly be roused by parents and others,” but that may be in time overcome, as the opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts is to be overcome, by custom, and education to the system. This scheme, which reads like a grim parody of the Contagious Diseases Acts, is indorsed by the _Lancet_, which speaks of the “importance” of Dr. Haynes’s letter.