In practice, it may be said that, in the first instance, the Court endeavours to satisfy itself that in the event of an inquiry, it is for the benefit of the alleged lunatic, and that there is a fair probability that the verdict will find him of unsound mind and incapable of managing himself or his affairs, by ordering him to be examined by a medical man, or by making a personal examination.
It seems strange that, notwithstanding these various Acts, and especially that of 1862, there should still be occasion for improvement in providing for the care of the property of insane persons. Yet so it is; and one of the Lord Chancellor's Visitors, Dr. Lockhart Robertson, has so recently as 1881 stated that "the important requisite of a cheap and speedy method of placing the property of lunatics under the guardianship of the Lord Chancellor has yet to be attained," and he quoted Master Barlow's evidence before the Dillwyn Committee of 1877: "I am a great advocate for a great reform in lunacy (Chancery) proceedings; I would facilitate the business of the procedure in the office and shorten it in such a way as to reduce the costs." Various important suggestions will be found in the evidence given before the above Committee by the present Visitors and an ex-Visitor, Dr. Bucknill, who has also, in his brochure on "The Care of the Insane, and their Legal Control," advocated radical changes in the official management of the insane. In addition to the establishment of State asylums for the upper and middle classes, he proposes that two central lunacy authorities should administer the laws, severally relating to the rich and the poor. The present Board of Commissioners would cease to exist; the Lord Chancellor, under the Royal prerogative, would preside over the former--the non-pauper--and the Local Government Board would exercise authority over the entire pauper class. By this means the existing system, under which the Chancery lunatics are cared for, "rooted," as Dr. Bucknill points out, "in the foundations of the English constitution," would be greatly extended, and "the present entanglement of authorities, always costly and sometimes conflicting," would cease. It remains to be seen whether these proposals can or will be carried out, and if so, whether they will prove as beneficial in practice as they are doubtless attractively harmonious and symmetrical in theory.