1695: Speech of His Grace the Duke of Mallard, delivered before the Right Honourable Lords Spiritual and Temporal, at Westminster, concerning the growing Distemper of Madness among the People
It is with a heart burdened by both compassion and alarm that I rise to address this august assembly upon a matter of most pressing concern: the evident, deplorable, and daily-increasing madness of the populace. Everywhere a contagion of the mind spreads unchecked, as though frenzy were the newest fashion and sobriety of thought the only thing now deemed unnatural.
We have among us, my Lords, men who think themselves prophets because they dream after supper; women who believe themselves angels because they faint in church; and tenants who mistake the crying of mice for divine revelation. This, I say, is not the liberty of the subject but the dissolution of it. Madness hath become democratic, if I may so express myself—an impertinent levelling of wits where the beggar imagines himself a philosopher and every milkmaid sets up to dispute the Trinity.
Now some, even among your Lordships (God forgive their clemency), have whispered that these poor creatures deserve our pity rather than restraint. Pity, indeed! Why, pity hath bred the very plague we now lament. Through misplaced tenderness we have allowed every idle melancholy to grow into rebellion, every enthusiasm to ferment into heresy. Thus mercy, ill-timed, hath become cruelty in disguise.
The streets, I say, are haunted not only by thieves and rogues, but by wild-eyed talkers of nonsense—fellows who declaim against government yet know not their own fathers, who draw diagrams in dust and name them worlds. And what, my Lords, is to prevent such madness from spreading up the very steps of this House, if not timely correction? It is but a short journey from a tanner babbling of spirits to a statesman mistaking obstinacy for principle.
Furthermore, and most distressingly, the infection hath reached even the gentler sex. Once the beauty of England rested upon modesty and reason; now we see ladies turning physicians of the soul, writing treatises upon sympathy and spirit, and discoursing openly of the passions—as if modest discourse itself were the crime. My own niece, Heaven help her, hath lately taken to translating heathen poetry and quoting it over breakfast, declaring that melancholy is genius in disguise. My Lords, I tremble for the virtue of the women when madness is called wit.
There is but one remedy proportional to the disease: the enlargement of our public institutions for the safe custody and correction of lunatics. Bethlehem, that venerable hospital of our capital, groans beneath its population. The wretches therein roar night and day, so that sane men cannot sleep within a half-mile of its walls. Shall we permit contagion through overcrowding, and so make the cure as dangerous as the illness? Surely no. New houses—clean, ample, divinely supervised—must be erected forthwith in every county. It would be fitting, methinks, that each institution bear the name of its principal benefactor, so the charitable spirit may be remembered by the public and rewarded in posterity.
And here, my Lords, I come to a point of duty, and of family. My nephew, Sir Giles Mallard, a sober and industrious young man of philosophical turn (though, to confess truth, afflicted with certain poetic tendencies which might worsen in idleness), seeks some employment worthy of his capacities. The superintendence of one such new house would, I think, exercise his talents and preserve his reason from the contagion of leisure. I trust, therefore, this proposal may commend itself to your Lordships’ generosity as both public service and private mercy.
In conclusion, let me declare—though I abhor cruelty, I hold that discipline is the truest kindness. Reason, my Lords, is a delicate flame; it must be fenced about, lest every wind of fancy extinguish it. We must not allow madness to masquerade as inspiration, nor sympathy to supplant order. For if we fail to restrain these excesses, the next century will see the very foundations of property, religion, and decency undermined by a multitude of dreamers, each calling his delusion truth.
Therefore, I urge—nay, I implore—that measures be taken for the confinement of the distracted, the correction of the disobedient, and the moral security of the fair sex, whose virtue is the common pillar of our state. Let the cures of Bethlehem be multiplied, the unruly silenced, and peace restored to our troubled realm. In this, my Lords, let us act not from cruelty but from wisdom, not as tyrants over the infirm, but as shepherds guarding a nation whose sheep have all begun to bleat to different moons.
(Ed.) His Grace then sat down, much satisfied, having spoken at length against enthusiasm in a tone most enthusiastic, and was applauded by those who had slept through the middle portion of his address.
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