It were easy to take up the duties of the Commissioners in Lunacy in detail, and to show that they cannot be efficiently performed by the existing staff; but the fact will be patent to any attentive reader of this chapter and of the foregoing dissertations on the provisions necessary for the care and supervision of lunatics in general. The scheme which we have, with all due deference to established authorities, sketched in outline, to increase the jurisdiction and usefulness of the Lunacy Commission, provides for a division of its staff; in the first place, by altering to a greater or less extent the character and position of the present Board, so as to constitute it a fixed central Commission or Council, chiefly charged with adjudging and determining questions put before it; with superintending the public arrangements for the interests of the insane generally, and with providing for the good and regular management, organization, and construction of lunatic asylums; and in the next place, by instituting, in connexion with this head deliberative body (which need not, by the way, consist of so many members as the present Commission), a corps of Assistant Commissioners, specially charged with the duties of visitation, inspection, and reporting, and with the carrying out of the resolutions determined on by the deliberative council. At the same time, the power of visiting and reporting might still be left with some Commissioners under certain circumstances, as well as in making special investigations, and in examining matters of dispute raised upon the reports of the Assistants.
Though differing from so high an authority as the noble chairman of the Lunacy Board, we must say that we cannot conceive of it as at all a necessary consequence, that, if the work of visitation to asylums and lunatics is performed by a class of inspectors or Assistant Commissioners, and not by the present members of the Commission, it must be indifferently done, and prove a source of dissatisfaction:--that is, we have no such apprehensions, provided always that proper men are appointed, and that their official status is made what it ought to be, both in remuneration and in independence of position. Nor can we agree to the giving up of the proposed plan on the score of its expense. If the whole of the lunatic and 'nervous' people suffering confinement in this country are to be brought within the knowledge and under the supervision of the Lunacy Commissioners, if the enlarged provisions of the law necessary for their proper care and treatment,--and even those only among them proposed by the Commissioners themselves are to be carried into effect,--the Commission must be increased. And, instead of adding new Commissioners on the same footing and salary as the existing ones, we believe the public would be better served by the appointment of Assistant Commissioners with the duties we have proposed,--two of whom could be remunerated at the same outlay as one full Commissioner. Moreover, we have proposed that the sum payable out of the Masters' office to medical visitors be devoted to the purposes of the Commission; and, if our notion of a central deliberative body were accepted, one legal and one medical member of the present Commission could well be spared to undertake more especially the duties of visiting Commissioners.