20. THE INEBRIATE; One Last Quote from “The Report”

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A TYPICAL REPORT TO THE STATE

{The Inebriate quotes from a report to the state of NY}

“In this aspect of the subject it is of vital importance that the enterprise should be kept pure, and true to its original intention, by the exclusion, as far as possible, of involuntary patients, or at least of such as are brutally in‑sensible and rebellious. This Asylum, I take it, is designed to appeal confi­dently to the reason and conscience of a class neither mad nor utterly de­praved ; and, from the best of these, to restore to society and the state so Much of usefulness and ornament, hon­est productiveness and intellectual in­fluence, as will repay the Common­wealth tenfold for the cost of the experiment. To introduce, therefore, the element of confinement and coer­cion is to degrade the Institution from its true character, as a saving and en­nobling home of faith and inspiration, into a mere house of correction or a jail.”

“So, also, to receive within our walls the forced commitments of a court or the common seizures of the police is at once to impair, if not destroy, the phil­osophical value of the experiment, and, what is worse, to embarrass the disci­pline and lower the moral tone of our probationary household.”