These quotations indicate the state of the law respecting the detention of lunatics elsewhere than in asylums. This state cannot be held to be satisfactory: it evidently allows the detention of lunatics in workhouses, while at the same time it affords them little protection against false imprisonment, and makes no arrangement for their due supervision and care, except by means of the visits of the Lunacy Commissioners, which are only made from time to time, not oftener than once a year, and rarely so often. The alleged lunatics are for the most part placed and kept in confinement without any legal document to sanction the proceeding; without a certificate of their mental alienation, and without an order from a magistrate. Within the workhouse, they are, unless infirm or sick, treated like ordinary paupers, save in the deprivation of their liberty of exit; they may be mechanically restrained, or placed in close seclusion by the order of the master, who is likely enough to appreciate the sterner means of discipline and repression, but not the moral treatment as pursued in asylums; and, lastly, they live deprived of all those medical and general measures of amelioration and recovery as here before sketched.
An extract from the 'Further Report' of the Commissioners in Lunacy will form a fitting appendix to the observations just made. It occurs at p. 287 (_op. cit._), and stands thus:--
"It certainly appears to be a great anomaly, that while the law, in its anxiety to guard the liberty of the subject, insists that no persons who are insane--not even dangerous pauper lunatics--shall be placed or kept in confinement in a lunatic asylum without orders and medical certificates in a certain form, it should at the same time be permitted to the master of a workhouse forcibly to detain in the house, and thus to deprive of personal liberty, any inmate whom, upon his own sole judgment and responsibility, he may pronounce to be a person of unsound mind, and therefore unfit to be at large."