reconciled with the whole Church tradition of the past ten centuries; that, if Augustine and Chrysostom and the Council of Agde were right, his decretal must be false; that it would, indeed, definitely justify the established practice in all the most civilized districts of Christendom; but earnest, traditional Christians like the author of " Vices and Virtues," together with the pious country priests and layfolk who took their teaching from them, would be almost as much shocked as their presentday analogues would be by a papal encyclical justifying the modernists in some important particular, and contradicting Pius X. Therefore, Gregory chose the safer course of conformity with tradition, and struck out the non, but without altering the rest of his decretal. Raymund and others, knowing of the pope's hesitations, ventured to treat the question as still open; and, finally St. Thomas's supreme common-sense prompted him to ignore Naviganti altogether, since further maintenance of the prohibition was becoming more hopeless from day to day. It was a reasonable way out of a hopeless impasse ; and even popes were glad to forget this unfortunate Naviganti. Yet it would not be safe to assume, as is often assumed, that this reasonable solution by the Angel of the Schools, unchallenged by any later pope, zealous for the authority of his predecessor Gregory IX, was really final for the rest of the Middle Ages. The extent to which the teaching of the great scholastics actually permeated ordinary medieval thought in some directions, but failed to penetrate it in others, has never been fully investigated; men often take cheaply for granted that so soon as we have found out what Aquinas wrote, then we know what all educated people thought after him. Yet in fact there is work for at least one generation of medievalists to get behind this easy anachronistic assumption, and to discover the real thoughts of the average medieval man, in their agreement or disagreement with the words of the teachers. In this matter of usury, we shall often find the refinements of Aquinas and his fellow-philosophers, among whom St. Antonino of Florence was most conspicuous, questioned or ignored down to the very end of the Middle Ages. St. Bernardino (d. 1444) finds it necessary to argue formally against the common impression that organized society cannot exist without usury. Antonius de Rosellis (d. 1466) specifies usury as one of the greatest souldangers, yet admits that even expert lawyers constantly disagree as to what is or is not usury. A distinguished preacher like the Franciscan Maillard, in 1500, still defines usury in the oldfashioned way as "anything whatsoever added to the principal," and states a case which he decides according to the earlier strict prohibitions. Behind these hesitations of the Teaching Church, which no pope or council ventured to remove, the actual practice of usury increased steadily, not only covertly but openly. The friars, the most determined opponents of this sin in their earliest days, too often became palliators and absolvers of the usurer, like the Jesuits of Pascal's day. Princes, and especially popes, made enormous profits by protecting the sinner; in France and Belgium especially, there was a class of usurers licensed by the State. "Christians," wrote St. Brigitta of Sweden, in about 1370, "practise usury no less than Jews; and in truth the Christian usurers are more covetous than the Jewish." Her contemporaries in England, in France, in Spain and in Italy tell much the same story. Germany was so eaten up with usury that Luther, like the Franciscan Maillard, was driven to favour the extreme prohibitions of the pre-Aquinas period. A little later, the States-General of France, sitting at Blois, complained to Henri IV of the uselessness of the usury laws. It would be better, they thought, to go back to the old prescriptions of pagan civil law, fixing the rate of interest from four to twelve per cent. according to different risks, without question as to the motives of the lenders. This (they argued) would be far more sound economically, as putting less restriction upon commerce, and would enable the authorities to suppress that custom of fraudulent contracts by which the existing usury laws were constantly evaded. In yet later times, to unravel this tangle of usury laws, which baffled even so great a theologian as Bossuet, three popes intervened-Alexander VII, Innocent XI, and Benedict XIV (the last by far the greatest canon lawyer of the whole post-Reformation papacy). Yet there was no ex cathedra definition; and even Benedict XIV's decisions were practically impossible to maintain under modern conditions, so that they resulted only in the substitution of crooked for straightforward usury. Yet, still, there came no help ex cathedra, nor has it ever come, " and, about 1830, there was a mere medley of doctrine." Then, at last, in response to pressing demands from bishops, priests and the anxious faithful, the Holy Office adopted a formula which is in use to the present day: "Penitents (in confession) are not to be troubled (by enquiries as to their investments) until the Holy See shall have published a definitive decision on this subject." Under cover of this amnesty, individual investors, and especially religious bodies and ecclesiastical corporations, have been free since 1830 to go on investing their money under ordinary business conditions, just as if not only St. Augustine and St. Chrysostom, but Gregory IX and St. Thomas Aquinas, had never existed. Yet this complete failure of the frontal attack upon usury, and even of some of the flanking movements, must not blind us to the honesty of the ideal. The medieval Church did in fact take one step forward in civilization by abandoning the laissezfaire of Roman imperial law. The emperors, like the Republic before them, had legislated on the principle of caveat emptor. Christianity changed this motto of "each must look after himself" into "let each man have consideration for his neighbour." If it went too far in this attempt to pursue morality without reference to economics, that is at least a nobler error than to pursue economics without reference to morality. Modern society, therefore, is justified in the eagerness with which it is now studying the medieval theories of the just price and of interest without usury. But it is very misleading to divorce these medieval theories, as is too often done, from the actual history of medieval practice; for (to end as I began) from that practice we get most illuminating sidelights upon modern prohibition." Any society imperfectly educated, and separated from the wider experiences of other nations or other centuries, easily falls into puritanical exaggerations, and sits down to build its towers without counting the cost. In calculating the probable issue of this modern conflict between a strict moral ideal and ordinary human inclinations, we must not neglect to study those three precedents of the past. G. G. COULTON THE CARE OF THE INSANE Report of the Royal Commission on Lunacy and Mental Disorder. Stationery EASON has not, throughout the ages, been able to free itself of an instinctive fear of unreason. In almost every land until quite recent times those men and women who have exhibited symptoms of mental abnormality have either been held in veneration and awe, or have been treated with the severity which is born of uneasiness. The consequences of this attitude are apparent to-day in the whole structure of the lunacy laws and their administration. The main object of these laws is detention, the removal of the victim of mental sickness from among his fellows and his close incarceration. Until yesterday, every asylum reflected this point of view. Asylums were, primarily, places of detention and of restraint. Any progress which was made in their conduct was, almost invariably, progress merely in general comfort. The insane person was housed better, fed better, clothed better than had been the practice in past days. He was not regarded with different eyes; his ailments were not viewed separately from himself; the idea that he was a sick mansick in mind that is to say-had scarcely been entertained. A great change in this attitude has now taken place. Thanks to the pioneer labours of a number of zealous physicians in this and other lands, the idea of "mental health" has slowly captured the mind of the medical profession. Mental ill-health has thus assumed an entirely different aspect. It has been taken from the category of mysterious visitations and has been placed, at last, in that of disease. This transference, one of the most remarkable in the history of medicine, has found its chief stimulus and its full justification in a number of very striking discoveries to which a passing reference is necessary. The first of these discoveries revealed the fact that a purely physical cause underlay that condition of hopeless imbecility known as Cretinism. It was found, as a result of careful post-mortem examination of the bodies of persons afflicted with this malady, that in these persons the thyroid gland was invariably absent. It was further observed that in all cases in which the thyroid gland had been destroyed by accident or disease, or had been removed by operation, a condition of mental sickness, similar in certain respects to Cretinism, made its appearance. The conclusion was reached that the thyroid gland exercises some influence over the health and activity of the brain. This conclusion was not at all in accord with current teaching, for it had been assumed for long that the thyroid gland, in company with some other glands of the body, possessed no real function; or, at any rate, no function which could be detected. It was decided, in view of the new knowledge, to give injections of thyroid to a number of cretinous patients. The results were dramatic in the most conservative sense of that abused word. The miserable imbeciles who received the new treatment became, in an almost incredibly short space of time, strong, robust children, clear of eye and brain and possessed of all their normal faculties. So great a transformation had never before been witnessed or even dreamed of outside of fairy tales. That tremendous achievement challenged the whole structure of accepted doctrine about insanity. For here was a state practically of amentia changed, by the administration of a few pellets of sheep's thyroid gland, into a state of reason and even of quick-wittedness. Might it not be said that other forms of mental disease were likewise responsive-granted the necessary knowledge of their causes-to purely physical treatment? This question found no further answer until the work of the late Sir Frederick Mott, then pathologist to the London County Asylums, was published. Mott furnished substantial proof of a view which others before him had advanced without such proof-that the condition known as general paralysis of the insane is, in fact, syphilis of the brain. It is, perhaps, difficult for a layman to understand the immense interest which this discovery created. General paralysis of the insane was one of the "classic" mental diseases. Its strange and arresting symptoms, those delusions of grandeur and riches and power which were described once as constituting "a triumphal march to the grave," had been explained again and again in terms of abnormal psychology. Keen students of the mind had attempted to build up theories of causation on the basis of the changes in behaviour met with in so many of the patients. Overnight, as it seemed, those theories VOL. 244. NO. 498. U |