having moved that the report of this bill be taken into further consideration,

observed, that the right hon. gentleman had great merit in having taken up the cause of the unfortunate lunatics. No class of society so strongly required the protection of parliament as these numerous and helpless sufferers. When parliament in 1774 passed the bill for the regulation of all licenced madhouses, it must have meant, by the visitation and inspection to which it subjected those houses, to do three things: in the first place, to secure all persons against unnecessary confinement; in the second, to better the chance of recovery to all such persons confined, as being insane, as well by moral treatment as by the use of medicine; and, thirdly, to insure the restoration of all such of the last persons as might become again of sound minds to society, to their friends, and to their employments. But the madhouse act does none of these three things, for it does not empower the commissioners to discharge a patient, however sound in mind, nor does it furnish them with the means of enforcing the observance of any improvement they may recommend to the adoption of the madhouses. The commissioners indeed may withdraw the licence of any madhouse when they see fit to do so, but the keeper of such house must again have a licence on the next licensing day, if he wishes it, for the act imperatively directs, that every person who shall require a licence shall have it, upon giving the requisite securities. It was not surprising that with those limited powers of the commissioners the greatest abuses should have been found to prevail in some of these houses, and that medicine should have been seldom, if ever, applied to the correction and cure of mental disease. In one public hospital indeed, that of Bethlem, the patients are periodically physicked, bled and vomited, and this too, he feared, without much reference to any difference of circumstances which may exist between case and case. The madhouse act directs that five com missioners shall yearly be elected by, and from the college of physicians, three of whom, attended by a secretary, shall at least once every year visit every licenced house within the cities of London and Westminster, and also all such as are within seven miles of either of them, and likewise all those which are within the county of Middlesex. It further directs that they inspect and take minutes of the state and accommodation of all these houses, as likewise of the treatment of their patients, a fair copy of which minutes was to be laid before the college of physicians. But from the great number of these houses (thirty-six), and their being spread over a vast area of ground, the duty imposed on the commissioners was prodigious, and the remuneration allowed them so pitifully small, that it would scarcely satisfy the coachman who drove them from house to house, each commissioner receiving only one guinea for every house he inspects, Under these circumstances it was natural that the visits of the commissioners should become short and hurried. In one instance, 406 patients were lately seen by them at Hoxton, and the house that contains them inspected in two hours and a half. He was ready to admit that the commissioners devoted as much of their valuable time to the service of the madhouses as could reasonably be expected for the paltry remuneration they received, but he contended, that the visits could render no service whatever to the maniacs, and that it was injurious to them, as giving sanction to the abuses which prevail in these houses, and as furnishing a plausible excuse to the friends of these sufferers for not themselves seeing them. And here he could not help remarking, that though he had been in the habit of visiting those houses all his life, he had not until the last few weeks seen a lunatic visited by his friends. The noble lord then enumerated several instances of abuse. In Hoxton, he observed there was no classification of the patients, but a general mixture of the furious with the placid—of those who were clean in their habits, with those who were most filthy. In the York Asylum, four cells, each only eight feet square, were accidentally discovered, though they had been sometime concealed from the visitors. In these four small cells, thirteen females were obliged to sleep every night, completely covered with filth and nastiness; and the very holes through which the air was admitted, were nearly filled with filth, which the unfortunate women had no other way of getting rid of. In this house, too, it was discovered that the male keepers had access to the female patients; the consequence of which was, that two patients, who bore good characters before they went into the Asylum, as they have since they were discharged from it, left it pregnant, the one by the principal keeper, the other by a patient. With these, and many other such enormities before him, he fervently wished that a more efficient law than that now in operation, might be enacted. He was particularly desirous that the bill then before the House, should enable magistrates to remove pauper lunatics from their respective parish workhouses to the next adjoining madhouses. Gentlemen not conversant with parish workhouses, were not aware how harshly these poor creatures were treated in them. To prevent their escape, they were consigned to the constant wear of straight waistcoats, and a straight waistcoat being of all instruments of personal restraint, the most heating and irritating, the poor lunatic in it becomes clamorous and noisy; when to prevent his annoying his neighbour by his noise, the lancet was applied to him, by which he was not unfrequently reduced to a state of exhaustion.

approved of what had fallen from the noble lord, and observed, that such a power as that to which he had alluded would be given by the bill. He had known several instances where great severity had been exercised in beeping pauper lunatics in parish workhouses.

wished that magistrates should also be empowered to examine houses where only one person was confined. He knew that objections would be made to this, as violating the sanctity of families. He would suggest, that no person should be allowed to receive a maniac, without a note from a medical man that the person was a proper subject for con finement, and also that the individual so receiving the maniac should give notice of such reception to the commissioners of madhouses.

wished to have Scotland included in the bill.

The bill was ordered to be recommitted tomorrow.

said, he did not think himself called on to detain the House on the subject of the motion he was about to submit to them, and to state the reasons why the grant of 3,500l. now demanded was unjust and uncalled for by any necessity, as they appeared so very obvious. The salary proposed was 3,500l. He had proposed in the committee on Friday last, that it should be reduced to 2,000l.; and he felt the strongest conviction that every man out of the House would think that he had rather erred in consenting to too large a sum. He was persuaded there was not a man in Great Britain, who understood the subject, nor a man in Ireland, who did not think he had been too liberal; but he would not depart from what he had moved, 'and he should again move, " that instead of 3,500l. the sum of 2,000l. be inserted."

as some gentlemen then in the House, were not present on Friday, went into a short account of the substitution in 1795, of a board of treasury in Ireland, in the room of three vice-treasurers, and of the reasons for the present measure.

The House then divided:

When the result was announced, it was received with loud and continued cheering.

List of the Majority and Minority.

said, that the arguments used by the gentlemen opposite, in favour of the vice-treasurer having a seat in parliament, had been chiefly founded on the magnitude of his salary; that salary being now reduced to 2,000l. a year, and the same grounds no longer existing, he should think it his duty, on the third reading of the bill, to oppose the clause for giving that officer a seat in the House, if ministers had the face to propose it after what had just taken place.

maintained, that it was not on account of the magnitude of his proposed salary that it was intended to give the vice-treasurer for. Ireland a seat in parliament, but it had been considered that a person entrusted with so high a charge must necessarily be fit to sit in that House, and could not but prove an acquisition to it.

wished to know what qualities, in the opinion of the chancellor of the exchequer, rendered a man fit to hold a seat in that House?

objected to the creation of a deputy to enable the vice-treasurer to have a seat in that House, unless he should be paid out of the salary of his principal. He contended that the vice-treasurer should remain in Ireland, where the monies were to be issued, and not augment the number of placemen in parliament.

said, the deputy would have the control of the whole office while the vice-treasurer was absent in parliament; what then became of all the arguments about responsibility?

The bill was ordered to be read a third time on Wednesday.

after adverting to the report of the committee upon the operation and progress of the Insolvent Act, observed, that it was deemed most expedient, as a temporary measure, to suspend the evil consequences of that act, leaving it to a future session to consider of an effectual remedy for all its ill effects. That this act had disappointed general expectation, there could not be a doubt; for the act had been found to give rise to considerable fraud. But still it was thought desirable to se- cure the clemency of the law to unavoidable misfortune; therefore a large discretion would be granted by the bill which he proposed, to the commissioner of the insolvency court, to enable that meritorious gentleman to discriminate between fraud and misfortune. The hon. baronet concluded with moving for leave to bring in a bill to amend the act of last session, and to give further powers to the court appointed by that act.

understanding that this was to be merely a temporary bill, would not oppose it. He had witnessed several frauds which had been committed by debtors, and he was glad to find that some mode was likely to be adopted by which the honest and industrious tradesman might be protected.

trusted that the House would feel that the committee had come to a proper decision in proposing only a temporary measure. The whole object of the bill was to give power to the commissioners, if it should be found that debtors had been guilty of gross injustice towards their creditors, either in contracting debts without adequate means of paying them, or in squandering money to take from them the benefit of the act, and confine them for a certain time. He had foregone his projected measure for entirely suppressing the insolvent debtor's court in favour of the present bill.—Leave was then given.