62 THE FAMILY AND THE NATION 



In the beginning of the nineteenth century, public 

 attention was drawn to the pitiable condition of the 

 insane, either when incarcerated in prisons and asylums, 

 or when wandering at large. A scientific study of 

 insanity began to correlate the phenomena observed 

 with other forms of mental and physical disease, while 

 popular novelists, such as Charles Dickens in Barnaby 

 Rudge, drove home to the public mind the inhumanity 

 of the then methods of treatment and non-treatment. 

 A long series of lunacy laws has followed on the 

 awakening of the national consciousness in this matter. 



But a recognition of the evil did not at once produce 

 a knowledge of the issues at stake. As is usual in all 

 legislative interference, the individual at first is dealt 

 with per se ; the surroundings in which he was bred, 

 their effect on him and his on them were ignored. 

 According to the mid-Victorian concept, a man was 

 either sane or insane — quite mad or completely cured. 

 How he became mad, how completely he was cured, 

 were not taken into consideration. When he was once 

 discharged from the asylum or refused admission to it 

 on the grounds of insufficient mental defect, like the 

 man in the old song. 



Whither he went and how he fared, 

 Nobody knew and nobody cared. 



Such a method of treatment has had its natural 

 effect in the extension by inheritance of mental in- 

 firmity. In the beginning of the twentieth century it 

 became necessary to appoint a Royal Commission to 

 inquire, not into the crowded state of the lunatic and 

 idiot asylums, but into the provision for guardianship 



