Now, Gentlemen, is it not better that I be thus employed, selling my books for their support, rather than be held as your State’s prisoner and State’s pauper simply because my “views of things” do not happen to coincide with your Superintendent’s views of things?
It is true, and, gentlemen, your Superintendent’s own statement verifies it, that I am not the only one who has been so unjustly imprisoned there, and in the name and behalf of those now there, I beg of this body that you extend to such a fair trial or a discharge. Really, the claims of humanity and the honor of your State both demand that my case stimulate the Illinois legislature of 1867 to provide legal safeguards against false commitments like my own.
Permit me here to add, that although I have come from Massachusetts to Illinois at my own expense, without money and without price, for the express purpose of bringing these claims of oppressed humanity to your notice, I do not demand nor ask for any remuneration for my false imprisonment in your State institution, nor for any personal redress of those legal wrongs which have deprived me of my reputation, my home, my property, my children, my liberty; but I do ask that the legal liabilities to such like outrages may be effectually removed by this legislature, and that the justice of a trial by jury may be forthwith extended to those now in that asylum, who have been consigned to an indefinite term of imprisonment, without any trial.
Gentlemen of this assembly, in view of the facts now before you, please allow me the additional privilege of adding a few suggestions. You see it has become a demonstrated fact that I, a minister’s wife, of Illinois, have been three years imprisoned in your State, by your laws, simply because I could not tell a lie—that is, I could not be false to my own honest convictions; and since I simply claim the right to be an individual instead of a parasite, or an echo of others’ views, I am branded by your laws as hopelessly insane!
Is it not time for you to legislate on this subject, by enacting laws which shall make it a crime to treat an Illinois citizen as an insane person simply for the utterance of opinions, no matter how absurd those opinions may be to others? Opinions cannot harm the truth, nor the individual, especially if they are absurd or insane opinions.
But for irregularities of conduct, such as my persecutors have been guilty of, the law ought to be made to investigate. Imprisonment for religious belief! What is it but treason against the vital principle of this American Government, viz.: religions toleration?
Would that I could have claimed protection under the banner of my country’s flag, while a citizen of Illinois. But no; this unjust statute law has consigned me to the reign of despotism. And so are all my married sisters in Illinois liable to this consignment, so long as this barbarous law is in force.
And O! the horrors of such a consignment! Only think of putting your own delicate, sensitive daughter through the scenes I have been put through. Do you think she would have come out unharmed? God only knows. But this I do know: that it is one principle of ethics, that a person is very apt to become what they are taken to be. You may take the sanest person in the world, and tell them they are insane, and treat them as your Superintendent treats them there—it is the most trying ordeal a person can pass through and not really become insane.
And most reverently does Mrs. Packard attribute it to God’s grace alone, for carrying her safely through this most awful ordeal, unharmed, and—I am almost tempted to add—God himself could not have done this thing without the strictest conformity on my part, to His own laws of nature, in connection with a well-balanced organization. As it is, to God’s grace alone. I say it, I am a monument for the age—a standing miracle, almost, of the power of faith to shield one from insanity, by having come out unharmed, through a series of trials, such as would crush into a level with the beasts, I may say, any one, who did not freely use this antidote.
Here let me make one practical suggestion. Is that kind of treatment which causes insanity the best adapted to cure insanity?