BELLA; OR, THE CRADLE OF LIBERTY. A STORY OF INSANE ASYLUMS.
BYMRS. EUGENIA ST. JOHN.
THIRD EDITION.BOSTON: PUBLISHED BY N. D. BERRY.
1874.Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, BY N. D. BERRY, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. Boston: Printed by Alfred Mudge & Son.
TO
THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES
This Book is Dedicated.
IT IS A BOOK OF TRUTH; AND AS SUCH WE GIVE IT TO THE COUNTRY, ASKING THAT GOD'S BLESSING MAY GO WITH IT.
THE AUTHOR.
PREFACE.
WE have not collected statistics to show the numbers of our people who are shut into the large and elegant locked buildings erected and sustained all over the intelligent portions of our country; but observing the daily committals to one, and casting a cursory glance abroad at the others, we can form an estimate that will show us that there is a fearful mistake in the nation, a wrong that the intelligence of the people should investigate, a wrong that is every day deepening into the people's lives.
A poet gives us an ideal picture of the passage to Inferno, in which the people are walking with their faces backward. The ideal finds its graphic reality in prisons and asylums, where people do walk with their faces introverted upon the past of their lives; and, excluded from present happiness, the past becomes a depth from which Memory draws to quench the agonies of the terrible present.
An imprisoned American is like a Fourth of July shut up without a fire-cracker. It wants to explode, but cannot. It gets angry, and snaps, or, yielding to its fate, sinks, faints, expires.
One might laugh at the present irrational mode of treating irrational minds, as we laugh at a well-acted farce, were it not for the tragedies at the end. But farce ceases to provoke page: 6-7[View Page 6-7] voke merriment when it has lines eternal and immortal in its acts.
That we may convey to the outside world some idea of the inner workings of our asylums, and give people some deductions derived from observation of them, this tale is written. We can say literally that the facts are truth, but they are not the whole truth; for, of the sufferings in connection with these legal houses for imprisoning the insane, the half can never be told. The institutions may bear the name of asylums, or hospitals, but they are prisons; and persons who have lived in them as patients know well how to judge of the effects of imprisonment, both in its moral and physical bearings.
MRS. E. ST. J.
