The Sun.
London, England, 1849-02-20 00:00:00

daughter, and said, ' I wish this day was over, something
dreadful will happen.' Ho was then compelled to go to
the madhouse.

" Mr. Drury—The doors were set open, and I could
not walk in any other direction. I fancied a voice said,
is in the madhouse, and the door is locked.' The
door was locked before I could move to get out. The
imagination has remained ever since, although Dr. Bom-
pas is dead, and I am in another asylum.
"In answer to questions put by Mr. Purnell, Mr.
Drury then said he had three forces on his mind at the
time he went in: the first was, that if he came into the
asylum he should be ruined; the second was, that the
innocent would suffer for the guilty; the third was, that
the deeds were inconsistent with his heart and soul; and
they locked the door of the madhouse."
After the perusal of this narrative, we repeat the
opinion we have more than once enunciated, that the
Fishponds Asylum is not one whit worse conducted
than the great majority of the private lunatic asy-
lums in the kingdom. In ninety-nine out of every
hundred of tho existing private lunatic asylums there
are at this moment cases infinitely more flagrant
than this of Mr. DRURY, and we fearlessly assert that
such there will ever be so long as it is the interest of
the keepers of these asylums to make persons mad
in order to secure their permanent residence
in the asylum, rather than to cure them, and thereby
lose the profit derived from their maintenance. It is
the fault of the Fystem, not of the men : the temptation
to which the keeper of a private lunatic asylum is
exposed, is too great for the generality of mankind to
resist, and no system of inspection can be organized
which shall prevent the recurrence of these intoler-
able abuses. •

Lssciate ogni speranza,
Voi the entrate
should be inscribed over the gateway of every
private lunatic asylum. It is only by doing away
altogether with the system of private asylums that
the insane will have a fair chance of recovery. The
jury found that Mr. DRURY was of unsound mind, and
had been so since December, 1847; consequently
he is now under the immediate protection of the Lord
Chancellor. We hope the Lord Chancellor will
consider it his duty to inquire into the conduct of
his own officers, the Commissioners in Lunacy, who
visited this Fishponds Asylum regularly:twice a year,
and who ought on each occasion to have per-
sonally examined Mr. DRURY. That such examina-
tion, if it ever took place, was of the most
superficial and unsatisfactory character is abundantly
evident, or they would have made themselves ac-
quainted with the real history of the case, and have
at once reported thereon to the proper authorities. It
appears that Mr. DRURY possesses landed property
worth between 1501. and 2001. a year, and that he
has no near relations. Probably the Lord Chancellor
may think it right to inquire who received this
income during the twenty or thirty years that Mr.
Daunt was a prisoner at the Fishponds, and what
became of the surplus, after the payment of his
expenses at the asylum. The necesssity for a speedy
reform of the Law of Lunacy becomes every day
more apparent; and we trust that the Society for the
Improvement of the Law will, without delay, adopt
measures for carrying into effect the excellent sug-
gestions of the Committee of Equity, to which the
consideration of the subject of the laws relating to
lunatic persons was referred. -