The Sun.
London, England, 1844-09-23 00:00:00

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LONDON, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER
1844.

The nomination of candidates for the Northern Di-
vision of Lancashire took place on Friday last at Lan-
caster, and there being no opposition, Mr. J. T. CLIF-
TON was returned. In returning thanks to his con-
stituents, the Hon. Member, after snaking the usual
electioneering boast that " this was the proudest
moment of his life," took the opportunity of observ-
ing—" I have stated to you a few of my political
opinions in my address, and now that I have the
honour of standing before you in the proud situation
of your representative, I tell you that I mill support
a Conservative Government. I will support that
Government so long as it remains Conservative, for I I
believe that it is a strong one, fit to rule a great
and mighty nation. If I did not retain the inde-
pendence of character which befits a gentle-
man, I should not be a worthy representative
of one of the finest counties of England." In the
course of hiS I),:rliauleiltary labours Mr. CLIFTON, we
fear, will not seldom have occasion to find that inde-
pendence, and Conservatism do not harmonise very

We hope that, in any measure which Sir JAMES
GRAHAM may introduce fur the regulation of the
medical profession, he will take avt ay, or at all events
greatly modify, the power which medical men now
possess of shutting up their fellow-subjects in lunatic
asylums. As the law at present stands, if any two
medical men choose to sign a certificate, stating that
in their opinion a person is insane, the keeper of an
asylum is obliged to receive such person into his
custody, how convinced soever he may be of the
sanity of the alleged lunatic. As a proof of the
necessity of some alteration of the law in this re-
spect, we refer our readers to a case which came
before Mr. BROUGHTON on Saturday at the Worship-
-greet Police-court. Sergeant FLYNN, of the N divi-
sion of the metropolitan police, appeared before the
magistrate to make arrangements for the maintenance
of his wife, whom he had caused to be incarcerated in
a lunatic asylum at Bethnal-green, although she was
perfectly sane. The following is the evidence of the
medical attendant of the asylum in which the poor
creature was confined :
" Mr. Phillips, who has been many years the principal
medical officer of the asylum, stated that during
several months that Ellen Flynn had been confined there
no symptoms of insanity had been discoverable in her,
and, in fact, she was quite sane. She had bean received
there upon a medical certificate, signed, as the law re-
quired, by two medical men."
The woman herself answered with great propriety
a variety of questions put to her by the magistrate,
and said that she had at one time been ill, and there
had been unhappy differences between her and her
husband, but she had never been mad, although she
had been spirited away and shut up as a mad woman.
We have small reason to boast of ours being the
land of liberty, if persons can be spirited away, and
shut up as mad in this manner. That the members of
the medical profession, as a body, are most honour-
able and high-minded, we freely admit; but it cannot
be denied that there are unworthy members of that
body who would, "for a consideration," abuse this
tremendous power with which the law has entrusted
them ; nor that there are ignorant and careless mem-
bers of that body who might, through want of know-
ledge, or want of caution, sign a certificate condemn-
ing a sane person to incarceration for life among
lunatics—a punishment more horrible than any our
legislators have devised for the most flagrant crimes.
But granting, for the sake of argument, that it is
impossible to find, in the United Kingdom, two dis-
honourable, or ignorant, or careless medical practi-
tioners, still, what precaution has been taken against
the commission of forgery? What is easier for a person,
desirous of procuring the incarceration of another as a
lunatic, than to forge the names of two medical men
to a certificate, and on the authority of that forged
certificate, to demand that the victim shall be received
into an asylum ? It is a dangerous and a fearful
thing to have this tremendous power entrusted to any
two individuals, however talented, or however honour-
able, they may be. No man should be deprived of
his liberty except by the verdict of a jury. In
cases of death of the body, a coroner's jury is assem-
bled to inquire into the circumstances by which that
death was occasioned. Let the same course be pur-
sued in cases of death of the mind ; and make it a
crime, to be punished with the greatest severity, in
any keeper of an asylum to receive into his custody
any alleged lunatic without a warrant from the
coroner, founded upon the verdict of a jury,
authorising such person's detention. Our law
will not suffer any alleged lunatic to be deprived
of control over his property without a preli-
minary inquiry before a jury, but while there is no

property in the case, he may be deprived of his per-
sonal liberty upon the mere certificate of two medical

men. The necessity of public inquiry before a jury
in every case of alleged insanity is curiously exempli-
fied in the case of Mr. THOMAS TELFORD CAMPBELL,
which is likewise reported in our paper of this day.
This gentleman, the son of the poet, had, it seems, been
an inmate for fourteen years of Dr. ALLEN'S lunatic

asylum at High Beach, having been originally re-
ceived there upon the usual medical certificate. In

consequence of the death of Mr. CesirnELL's father,
the trustees, under the will of a relative, from whom
the alleged lunatic derived an annuity, considered it
would be unsafe to continue the payment of that annuity
to any one on behalf of Mr. CAMPBELL without
instituting some inquiry. A. Commission was con-
sequently issued, an investigation took place, and the
jury returned, as their verdict, that Mr. THOMAS TEL-
FORD CAMPBELL was of sound mind.
As long as the present state of the law continues,
the personal liberty of every one is in danger. It is
the bounden duty of the Government to devise some
remedy for a grievance so intolerable and so monstrous
as this.

Accounts from Lisbon to the 16th have been re-
ceived. They are void of interest. The Cortes open
on the 30th inst. It is expected that COSTA CABRAL
will have a majority of 22 in the Chamber of Depu-
ties, but that he will be in a minority in the Peers.
SA DE 13ANDEIRA, PALMELLA, all the old friends and
supporters of Don PEDRO—the men to whom her

well with each other, but that, in order to maintain
the one, he must make no inconsiderable s-erifice of
the other. It is all very well for him to make a
boast of his " independence" on the hustings, for the
term is a specious one, and tells with the commu-
nity ; besides, it is an exceedingly:safe and accommo-
dating one, and commits the speaker to nothing ; but
should he venture upon putting his boast strictly
into practice, he will soon find out that he has essayed
a task which occasionally will be found difficult, if
not wholly impracticable. Suppose, for instance, he
had been in Parliament during the last session, how
would he have reconciled his notions of " indepen-
dence" with his support ofa Conservative Government ?
In common with scores of other Conservatives, he would
inevitably have been dragged through the dirt by the
Minister—compelled, in fact, to vote just as he
pleased, on the penalty of being proclaimed an oppo-
nent of Government, and taunted with a wish to bring
in the Whigs, and so seriously injure the prospects of
Conservatism. The last session was a particularlyticklih
one for independent Conservatives, damaging not a few
of them in the estimation of the right-thinking portion
of the community, and we hardly anticipate that the
next will be much more favourable to the character of
these would-be independent members. In fact, to be
a good Conservative, in Sir ROBERT PEEL'S sense of
the term, is merely to see with his eyes, hear with his
ears, decide according to his conviction, and vote at
his dictation. Is Mr. CLIFTON prepared to act in this
easy, accommodatibg manner ? If
,he be, he will
certainly redeem his pledge of
_supporting a Con-
3ervative Government, but he will just as cer-
tainly falsify his hustings boast of indepen-
dence. But enough of this gentleman, whose prin-
ciples are little to our taste, for in the first place,
there is much that is vague and unintelligible
about them ; and secondly, where they are intelligible,
they savour rather too strongly of that Toryism which
ever has been, and will most likely ever continue to
be, a foe to the progress of all rational improvement.
At the Nomination to which we have been alluding, a
gentleman named LIVESEY made several very excel-
lent and pertinent strictures on the subject of, what
is falsely called, the Protective system. "Protection,"
be said, is put forward as a cry on behalf of the
farmer and the agricultural labourer. They
are always put forward as if there were an
eternal sympathy for them ; but the truth
s —and it ought to come out—that the protec-
tion is not for the farmer or the labourer, but for the
landlord. It is a probection for rents. Farmers are
only middle-men; whatever they receive goes even-
tually to the owner of the land. You have heard
many speeches about protection, but you have never
yet been told the plain truth that it means protection
for rents." If this truth has never before been blurted
out so boldly as it is here done by Mr. LIVESEY,
has at any rate been pretty generally guessed
at ; and but few people who have the slightest
pretensions to good sense are any .longer at a loss
to account for the desperate tenacity with which—
lespite all justice, all reason, all humanity—
the monopolists still persist in clinging to the corn-
laws. The sacred interests of their breeches pockets,
or rather what they fancy to be such, are embarked
in the question ; hence their determined hostility to
free-trade. There is nothing enlightened—nothing
enlarged or magnanimous in their opposition ; they
regard the matter simply as one affecting themselvesf
,tncl keep the just claims cf the people to a system of I
unfettered trade wholly in the back-ground. And
yet these are the men who are incessantly taunting
the free-traders with their mean selfishness, and
vaunting their own superior disinterestedness ! Shame
on such barefaced hypocrisy !