Daughters of the Puritans

Excerpt: ...persons within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens, chained, naked, beaten with rods and lashed into obedience. I give a few illustrations but description fades before reality." If we could dismiss the subject by saying she reports instance after instance where men and Pg 145 women were confined in the almshouses in Massachusetts in such conditions of inhumanity and neglect as no intelligent farmer would tolerate for his swine, we could avoid some unpleasant details; but the statement would be ineffective because it would seem incredible. At the almshouse in Danvers, confined in a remote, low, outbuilding, she found a young woman, once respectable, industrious and worthy, whose mind had been deranged by disappointments and trials. "There she stood," says Miss Dix, "clinging to or beating upon the bars of her caged apartment, the contracted size of which afforded space only for increasing accumulations of filth,