On the assimilation of the law in England, Scotland, and Ireland, as to the care of lunatics and their property

Abstract

As the care of lunatics is a work of state charity, which is necessarily free from all religious or political bias, it is difficult to understand why there should be any difference in the laws on the subject in the Three Kingdoms eighty years after the Irish union, and one hundred and seventy years after the Scotch union. The sad results of this difference, so far as Ireland is concerned, have been brought before Parliament in the Report of a Commission presented in February last, which disclosed the rather startling fact that the neglected lunatics had increased from 1,500 to 3,000 in the last twenty years, that this increase arose in part from the nonextension to Ireland of the English Act of 1853.