cry out that a patient has been neglected. There is a levy en masse of responsible governors to quell the disturbance and to certify that the patient has been treated with all possible care, attention and humanity.'" patients and private patients of the physician were admitted and on paying perquisites to the officials received careful attention to the neglect of the poorer patients, (3) that the asylum was in a state of extreme filth, and (4) that there was an entire absence of dis- A committee of investigation desire to be cipline." A few extracts from the report of shown the house. Certain cells in an extreme this committee may be of interest. "No state of filth and neglect are omitted to be official visits were paid; no one except the pointed out to them. The governors examgovernor could enter the asylum without per- ined the accounts. There are considerable mission from the physician. The steward, sums of which neither the application nor the man of eighty-two years of age, who had full receipt appears. The servant's books are powers over every servant in the house, lived inquired for. In a moment of irritation (?) a quarter of a mile from the asylum and was he selects for the flames such as he thinks often prevented by infirmity from visiting it it not expedient to produce. And yet every in the winter time. An inferior male keeper circumstance of concealment is imputed by was intrusted with the key of the beer and some to mere accident, and every attempt to bread. The apothecary, Mr. Atkinson, tear off the mask and exhibit the asylum in claimed no authority, and the authority of its true character is stigmatized as a libel or his wife was partial and contested. The back an indelicate disclosure. The last evidence door was never locked and the servants might as to the state of matters in York Lunatic and did go out night and day. They took Asylum with which we shall trouble our the cast-off clothes of the patients when they readers is contained in a speech delivered by considered them to have been worn a suffi- Lord R. Seymour in the House of Commons cient time." "On the night of December 28, on June 17, 1816. "Four cells," said his 1813, when a detached wing of the asylum lordship, " each only eight feet square, were was destroyed by fire, the physician was away accidentally discovered though they had attending a patient at a distance from York; been some time concealed from the visitors. the steward was in his house; the apothecary In these four small cells thirteen females and his wife the housekeeper had gone out were obliged to sleep every night completeto spend the evening. Of the four servants ly covered with filth and nastiness, and the left in charge of one hundred and twenty very holes through which the air was admale patients one had left a fellow servant to mitted were nearly filled with filth which the lock them up, and was absent. His fellow unfortunate women had no other way of getservant had put his patients to bed a little ting rid of. In this house, too, it was disbefore the usual hour of eight, that he might covered that the male keepers had access to go to a dance; the third attendant was old the female patients, the consequence of which and asthmatic, and the fourth alone was able was that two patients, who bore good charto render any competent assistance." Again: acters before they went into the asylum left. "In the asylum investigations concealment it pregnant, the one by the principal keeper, appears at every step in our progress. Three the other by a patient." It appears, by the hundred and sixty-five patients have died; way, that this keeper was not only not disthe number is advertised two hundred and missed, but continued to enjoy the confidence twenty-one; a patient disappears and is of the governors and on his ultimate resignanevermore heard of-he is said to be 're- tion received from them a testimony of their moved'; a patient is killed, the body is hur-"approbation of his conduct during a serried away to prevent an inquest. The public vice of twenty-six years." LUNACY REFORM IN ENGLAND. It is generally assumed that England, like her continental neighbors, owes her entry on the paths of lunacy reform at the end of last and the beginning of this century to the influence of Phillipe Pinel, who gradually abolished the régime of " stripes, fetters and darkness" at the Bicêtre, and whose statue still confronts the tourist at the gates of the Salpêtrière in Paris. This is, however, a mistake. Our present system of asylum administration is of purely English origin. The writings of Swift and Defoe did something to create a public demand for lunacy reform. But the energizing impulse came from William Tuke, the founder of the York Retreat, and the grandfather of Dr. Hack Tuke, one of the most distinguished alienists of the present day. In and kindness. He brought the proposal before the Society of Friends, of which he was a member, in the spring of 1792. The funds were provided, and in 1796 the York Retreat was definitely opened. The Retreat was conducted from the beginning on the principle that the utmost practicable degree of gentleness, tenderness and attention to the comforts and feelings of the insane was, in DR. HACK TUKE. 1791 the friends of a patient who was confined in the infamous York Lunatic Asylum, of which we have already given a sketch, desiring to visit her, were refused admission, and suspicion was aroused as to the treatment to which she was being subjected. The incident was brought to the knowledge of William Tuke, a prominent citizen of York, and in conjunction with a spectacle which he witnessed in St. Luke's Hospital, London, of lunatics lying on stones and in chains, it filled him with an ardent desire to erect an institution where nothing should be concealed, and where patients should be treated with consideration the language of the "British Review," "in the first place due to them as human beings, and in the next place infinitely the most promising means of effecting their recovery." Mechanical restraint was reduced to an altogether subsidiary place in the regimen. of the asylum; and the emotions which the news inspired in the breasts of patients were well described by an unfortunate man who had nearly lost the use of his limbs from being chained in another asylum and who, on being asked by his friends after a short residence in the Retreat what he called the place, exclaimed, "Eden, Eden!" In 1813 Mr. Samuel Tuke published a "Description of the Retreat." This volume was regarded as an attack upon the York Lunatic Asylum. A letter in reply to it, signed "Evigilabor," but really proceeding from the superintendent of that institution, appeared in the papers. A long and heated correspondence followed. Then a charge of illtreating a patient was made against the superintendent of the York Asylum by Mr. Godfrey Higgins, a magistrate. The select committee above mentioned was appointed, and the English legislature entered upon a consideration of the question how the proper care and treatment of the insane was to be secured. We cannot trace the legislation that followed in detail. Practically it proceeded upon two converging lines, the one relating to jurisdiction in lunacy, the other to lunacy administration. With the former we are not here1 concerned. The latter pursued a somewhat uneven course. Private madhouses had already been required to be "licensed" by five Fellows of the College of Physicians. But the Fellows had no power to refuse licenses and no funds to 1 In another paper we shall give an account of the jurisdiction in lunacy. prosecute offenders. Then a body of metropolitan commissioners with wider powers were appointed and permissive provision was made for the erection of county and borough asylums. At length in 1845 the present Lunacy Board, with its unpaid and paid commissioners (legal and medical) was created, and subsequent legislation in 1853, 1862, 1890 and 1891 established in its entirety the present system under which every asylum in the land is periodically visited, mechanical restraint is subjected to the most stringent regulation, persons are detained in asylums only under judicial authority, and the utmost freedom consistent with order and safety is enjoyed by all patients. THE THE ENGLISH BAR UNDER A NEW LIGHT. HE Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria was the occasion of a new departure by that most conservative of bodies-the bar of England. The Law and the Gospel in England have always had points of contact. The assizes, notwithstanding the malign memories which the hateful name of Jeffries has attached to the function, still open with a sermon. Once a year the judge proceeds in state to St. Paul's Cathedral to hear afternoon service, and of late years English barristers who belong to the Roman communion, borrowing a hint from the messe rouge which has been the initial act of the French legal year for centuries, have held a "red mass" of their own on the first day of Michaelmas sittings. But hitherto the English bar as a whole, which is preponderatingly Anglican, from the religious point of view, has taken part in no annual act of corporal worship. This reproach the Queen's Diamond Jubilee has been the means of rolling away. the morning of Sunday, the 20th of June, two hundred members of the bar attended On the thanksgiving service at St. Paul's Cathedral in their full professional costume. An account of the origin and details of this departure may prove of interest to American readers. As everyone knows, who has followed even cursorily the progress of the recent Jubilee celebrations in England, the Queen arrested the course of her triumphal procession through the capital on Tuesday, June 22, for the purpose of a brief thanksgiving service, which was held under the auspices of the primates of England and the Bishop of London at the foot of the great steps leading up to the main entrance into St. Paul's Cathedral. This service was intended to be entirely distinct from those that were to be held within the Cathedral on the previous Sunday. But it soon became apparent that the public were confusing the two, and accordingly the Bishop of London wrote a letter to the papers pointing out that the thanksgiving service on the Tuesday was a mere episode or incident in the royal pro |