Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. LUNATICS, AND THE LUNACY LAWS. THE first speech Lord Ashley ever delivered in Parliament was on February ipth, 1828, when he seconded a motion of Mr. Robert Gordon for " A Bill to amend the Law for the Regulation of Lunatic Asylums." It was a subject on which his compassion had been for some time expended, and it was one which needed, almost more than any other at that time, thorough investigation, with a view to check the evils crying aloud for redress. The barbarous treatment of lunatics even so recently as the latter part of the last century and the first quarter of the present century is almost incredible to-day. Although in some places asylums were provided, the system pursued was almost invariably coercion, severity, and cruelty. Up to the year 1771, for example, the lunatics in the old Hospital of Bethjlem, in Moorfields, London, were exhibited for a fee of twopence, as if they had been wild beasts, and the poor creatures were goaded to fury, to render the exhibition more exciting. In the year when this shameful exhibition was prohibited, Henry MackenzieLunatics, and the Lunacy Laws. 51 published his " Man of Feeling," containing a description of the hospital. " Their conductor," he says, " led them first to the dismal mansions of those who are in the most horrible state of incurable madness. The clanking of chains, the wildness of their cries, and the imprecations which some of them uttered, formed a scene inexpressibly shocking. Harley and his companions, especially the female part of them, begged their guide to return ; he seemed surprised at their uneasiness, and was with difficulty prevailed on to leave that part of the house without showing them some others, who, as he expressed it, in the phrase of those that keep wild beasts for show, were ...