How much more knowledge and experience would have been required of this young man if the county had seen fit to maintain a menagerie! No one would think of entrusting the animals to one so wholly inexperienced in their care. This young man might be employed as an assistant, but he would never be placed in charge of an animal house full of valuable specimens. Do not make the mistake of thinking that the wretched people who are confined in these cages were selected from a larger number of insane inmates of the Poor Farm on account of exceptional intractability or because their brains have been so dulled by the final stages of dementia that they are no longer conscious of their surroundings. These people are not a few selected for such reasons; they constitute all but one of the avowedly insane who are housed in this Poor Farm. They include persons as appreciative as you or I would be of the loathesomeness of their surroundings and of the personal humiliation of being confined in such a place. In one cage is a man who has delusions which doubtless make it unsafe for him to have his liberty in the community. He has not been allowed outside his cage _for a single hour_ in three years. This place was built twenty years ago. Perhaps the brain which planned it is now dust, nevertheless its ignorant conception of the nature of mental disease still determines the kind of care this county affords the most unfortunate of all its helpless sick. Perhaps, too, the hands which laid these bricks and forged these iron bars are now dead, nevertheless they still stretch out of the past and crush the living in their cruel grasp. The conception of mental diseases which gave to this county this dreadful place did not even reflect the enlightenment of its own period. Eighty years earlier Esquirol had stirred the pity of France by a recital of miseries no worse than those which you can see in this county to-day. Many years before this place was built, Conolly had aroused public opinion in England to such an extent that it was possible for cages such as these to exist in only the darkest corners of the land. Thirty years before this grim structure arose from the fair soil of Texas, Dorothea Dix was showing the inhumanity of almshouse care of the insane in this country and members of our legislatures were profoundly stirred by her descriptions of conditions less abhorrent than those which exist to-day in the Poor Farm which I have just described. Great reforms in the care of the insane have extended over the entire country ever since these walls were built but they have left this place untouched and it stands to-day, not a pathetic but disused reminder of the ignorance and inhumanity of another age and of another kind of civilization, but an actual, living reality reproducing, with scarcely a detail lacking, conditions which were described in pitying terms by the writers of four centuries ago.