DEAN STANLEY ON NATIONAL MADNESS.

Thames Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2858, 12 April 1878, Page 2

DEAN STANLEY ON NATIONAL MADNESS.

Lecturing at Clifton in December, the Dean of Westminster made some remark? on madness of communities, which are singularly applicable to Victoria at the present time, and which a fair yean' unchecked development of present symptoms in some parts of New Zealand will reader applicable to this colony also: " Many, no doubt, bare heard of the story of the most famous Bishop of Bristol, who walked in the dead of tbe night in the garden of the now destroyed palace, , and asked his chaplain ' Why might hot whole'eommunities and public bodies be seized with fits of insanity as well as individuals? (Laughter.) Nothing but tMI principle, that they are liable to insanity equally at least with private peraous, can account for the major part of the i transactions of which we read in history.' 1 Yes, Bishop Butler was right. Such madness had.been enacted many timesi: before and after his day. The madneia of the people of London in the note of Lord George Gordon, the frenxy of the revolutionary Governments during the Beign of Terror, and, must he add, the madness of the people of Bristol—(laughter) —in 1831, wnen, besides many other places, the very ground on which Butler made that remark a century before vaa wrecked, all these, and the innumerable theological panics be had seen rite and fade away, were examples of the danger to which they were exposed in. public questions, unless by the stern education of afterlife they deliberately guarded themselves against it. (Hear, hear.) It was with no view of producing an undue distrust either of human nature or of popular judgment that he ventured to dwell on the deep conviction of'the instability of temporary judgments which this experience of life constantly impressed on them. Like all insanity, these . public insanities were best met by sanity. Like all falsehood and hollowneas they were resisted by determination on the part of those who knew better not to concede by any one hair's breadth to what they knew to be a fiction or a crime."