Another Failure of the Lunacy Law Reformers

requiring the ratepayers to maintain lunatics of the middle and lower classes." The last of these two propositions is easily dealt with. If the honourable member had only taken the trouble to get up any information at all before he addressed the House on so important a subject, he would have found that at all country and borough asylums there is a system of payment enforced upon the relatives of the lunatic to assist in defraying his expenses at the asylum; that in quite recent numbers of the medical journals, the eminent superintendent of the Kent County Asylum advertises to receive private patients at the uniform rate of seventeen shillings a week ; and that at St.