Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/68

58 the old time and the mere study of the fact; we have introduced characters into the personages, which, while they correspond to living and real characters that we have under our eyes, attempt to resolve a problem and teach us a moral, and go so far as to represent to us a symbolical idea which is a pure abstraction of the author's, reaching thence the maximum of complication.

Naturally, such salient characters as madmen, eccentrics, and criminals would not be likely to escape the notice of the dramatist, who finds in them motives for great effects without departing from truth and probability.

But there is another more material reason for the recent introduction of insane characters into the theater, and for their greater frequency and participation in real life. It has been remarked that insane persons have multiplied a hundredfold with civilization, to such an extent that where a few years ago one madhouse was enough, now five hundred and six are needed. Taking, for example, the statistics of the most progressive country in the world, those of the United States, furnished by its invaluable census report, we see that the number of insane persons, which was 15,610 in 1850, 24,042 in 1860, and 37,432 in 1870, rose in 1880 to 91,994; while the population, from 23,191,876 in 1850, increased to 38,558,371 in 1870, to 50,155,783 in 1880—that is, while the population doubled in a little more than thirty years, the insane increased sixfold; so, in the last decade the increase in population was thirty per cent, and that of insane one hundred and fifty-five per cent.

In France there were 131.1 insane per 100,000 inhabitants in 1883, 133 in 1884, 136 in 1888. These figures indicate that the number of insane is larger in the most civilized countries, and is increasing every year. It may indeed be said that many of these insane are not produced but are only revealed by civilization, and that the opening of the large asylums has caused a considerable number to be brought into the light who were not known of before. It is true that the greater care we give now to the insane, as well as to consumptives, makes them longer-lived. And it is true that as the mind grows enlightened criminals come to be regarded as insane and thus increase the apparent number of such. But all this is not sufficient to explain a doubling in a decade, a tenfold increase in twenty years.

We know, too, that civilization has brought on the development