get damaged coffee or sour milk, or are
inadequately supplied with flannels and clean linen, there will be an
outcry and an inquiry, and a Secretary of State will lose a percentage
of his influence, and learn to look better after the administration of
patronage. But, at the same time, the area of punishment--or of
"treatment," as it is mildly termed--becomes alarmingly widened, and
people require to look sharply into themselves lest they should be
tainted with any little frailty or peculiarity which may transfer them
from the class of free self-regulators to that of persons under
"treatment." In Owen's parallelograms there were to be no prisons: he
admitted no power in one man to inflict punishment upon another for
merely obeying the dictates of natural propensities which could not be
resisted. But, at the same time, there were to be "hospitals" in which
not only the physically diseased, but also the mentally and _morally_
diseased, were to be detained until they were cured; and when we reflect
that the laws of the parallelogram were very stringent and minute, and
required to be absolutely enforced to the letter, otherwise the whole
machinery of society would come to pieces, like a watch with a broken
spring,--it is clear that these hospitals would have contained a very
large proportion of the unrationalised population.

There is rather an alarming amount of this sort of communism now among
us, and it is therefore with some little misgiving that one sets down
anything that may betray a brother's weakness, and lay bare the
diagnosis of a human frailty. Indeed, the bad name that proverbially
hangs the dog has already been given to the one under consideration, for
bibliomania is older in the technology of this kind of nosology than
dipsomania, which is now understood to be an almost established ground
for seclusion, and deprivation of the management of one's own affairs.
There is one ground of consolation, however,--the people who, being all
right themselves, have undertaken the duty of keeping in order the rest
of the world, have far too serious a task in hand to afford time for
idle reading. There is a good chance, therefore, that this little book
may pass them unnoticed, and the harmless class, on whose peculiar
frailties the present occasion is taken for devoting a gentle and kindly
exposition, may yet be permitted to go at large.

So having spoken, I now propose to make the reader acquainted with some
characteristic