WELLINGTON.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXI, Issue 5294, 30 January 1879, Page 2

WELLINGTON.

[prom our own correspondent.] Certainly, the dullest months- in. Wellington, speaking from a political, point of view, are the first months in the year. There are no political rumors of any kind — all is stagnation. Ministers . seem to content themselves with ordinary routine work, and there are no rumors anent them. Sir George Grey came back looking fresh and jaunty after his holiday at Kawau, and has lost a great part of his old care-worn enfeebled looks. Holidays evidently do him good. The Commission appointed last session by Parliament to enquire into the existing state of higher education in the colony and to suggest remedies for its defects, is now sitting in Wellington. It will sit for about three weeks here and then probably adjourn to some other place to get further knowledge. On the commission are Professors Sale, Shand, Brown, Cook and Ulrich, with Dr. Macdonald, Dr. Hector, and three or four members of

Parliament. Probably, there will be very little. good donevfor^eabh- of thecommijßsioners has his ownfpetf soheme^Tand will fight tooth and nail for his 'special fad. r No one knows what the commission wtii recommend. ■ Some wist -the Ni'Z,. Jn&ve.rsity tPbe not merely an examiiung Others ridicule the ideaVfcv' The .Canterbury commissioners hav|^special;ideasj^and so have the Ojago i mjn^; The^kssical men want pr^|inence|^iven to Latin^anjit^Greek, while the '* "museum" men *g6'inheavily for science.,! big book will be published and that wifi|pe all. Prior to tKe departure of his Excellency he is to be liberally fgted, by public din- ; v ners and addresses. ... He is extremely popular in Wellington. A petition asking both Houses of Parliament to interfere with Chinese immigration is being liberally signed by persons of all classes, and if other places take up the matter energetically, a really monster petition will be presented to Parliament. Many persons} however, feel strongly that such action is action uselessly taken against an evil that may never ■come, '■ :':*i '•■■''- '*■ ' • ■: • "J'^y -; As yet very little interest is taken in - the Wellington races, and the amount of betting done is /very small. The 'reason probably is that very few, if any 'Pf the horses are owned by 'Wellington men •; ;'in fact there is not a single man in town who owns race horses, and the runhplders in the Wairarapa utterly eschew racing. ,A. : few horses come from Wanganui, but there are no horses in which the citizens of Wellington are specially, interested. « The stewards of the Jockey Club are, men who know nothing of racing, men who do not now own, and probably- never have owned racehorses. There are no men here of the stamp of the late Mr Watt, or of Messrs Gaisford and Farmer. Until we have some locally-owned racehorses, there will be comparatively little enthusiasm/ - An old Hawke's Bay; horsejibred .' at Tamumu, ■ called The Agent, has a capital chance for. the hurdles > arid, Unless^jjjtoo heavily handicapped^ will do i well. ' r;; ' The weather has been delightfully.fine ;«V :,-, .days calm and bright, but noti»ib not. 'TJtta^^ •' ii by far the pleasantest time of the year, \, lX in Wellington., 1 "... : ! \"".'"'.'r. :■!.. ;'M / ? " v Our. City Councillors are doing nothing in the matter of sewerage. They talk wad V talk and wrangle,: but fail-to get,;pn,mth.,tf£ business. At present they have not decided where to; cast the sewage, and they.- ;y » have only j ust decided what engineer shall take charge of it. It is certain , that n^y months will elapse ere' an actual start is . .A made. ' ''''' *' r '• ■'"'"'.'', : "■'■*■'■'&> L, Money very "tight ;",everyone, asks lOjt , per cent, and demands enormous securityv^f* Freehold property much depreciated, be- ..,^ cause people have, no money ,sb invest. 11 <v ; Several of the banks are steadily calling in all overdrafts, and a good many people a t ? f { feel the pressure very acutely. At present"- 1 ' there have been no bankruptcies, ..buj^i most men expect a plentiful crop u*~ the' depression in trade continues for a yeryi I'^:1 '^: few months. ; MODEL LTTJ^TIC ASYLUMSy :^^'s .- , , (From the "Pall Mail jsudget V)' ' /■-■h'y.'g. A model lunatic asylum may be described as the place where the managing doctor has his heart hi : his;wprk and is seconded,;,^ by assistants equally zealous f6r,.the_cu?e vJ of patients. These co'nditiona may, be found as well in a small and poor asylum as in a large and rich one ; but given a good medical staff, and the lunatics will of course get extra chances of< cure' if they^^,. be surrounded by all that canTmake them happy by furnishing them with ismploy^"'^ ment and recreation. In some, former t remarks on the condition of the mentally; i^ afflicted we endeavored to show why large State asylums were so much preferable to .r X small private ones ; but the large asylums .-' l ' } ' have their abuses too; and chief among p ..t these, in places wjiere the doctors; are nob%v alive to their duties, is the tendency to screw as much work as possibleout of tharf ? ? lunatics, in order that the directors of an asylum may be able to public^ -imposing tables of financial statistics, every year. An instance of this' may be ciijed in connectibri with the famous ;,lutiatiri oolbriy of Gheel, in .Belgium.^ 'Gheei,^ which is „.. situated in thd. midst of, theCampine in } " the province of . , Antwerp, 5 hal» , been/, a -lunatic colony for ages ; and patients are sent to it, from all parts , of ■ the kingdom; 0 , ; ; > They are of three classes : ? those supr ported by Government, ; those at ; . the charge of their parish, and those paid for by their friends; The first two classes pay 200 f. a-year for their board, 50f. for clothing, 12f.,f0r medical, attend- . o ance,,and some odd sums for extras, 5 which bring up the total to £12 per annum ; the lunatics 1 at ; the charge of their families pay according to. the comforts and ■ small luxuries , stipulated for them, but the scales are always moderate even when the- patients come of wealthy families. The colony is managed on the boarding-out system^ 'Every patient is seat to reside in the family of a peasant I or farmer, and, when fit to work, is employed on agricultural labor. "Now, some „ time ago a patient who; had; spent six '„ 'months at Gheel,. and,, gat cured, pub- , lished some startling disclosures as to the ' neglect and ill-treatment to which the ,k lunatic colonists; were subjected. Many IW of them had sunk intq the condition of \ mere bondsmen under harsh taskmasters. , v They were forced to do the most repulsive j" sorts of work ; being often confined indoors when they ought to have been in the , . : fields, and at the least murmur of discontent they were threatened with the "infirmary," which had become a name of terror in their ears because it was nothing else but a filthy prison. Here the refractory were put into shackles and straitwaistcoats, afflicted with " douches," andlocked up in unwarmed cells. But the evil did - r "not stop here; for it seems that the^ doctors, who ought to have exercised a close supervision over the cottages and farms to see that they were properly kept, seldom troubled themselves^ to pay any \j domiciliary visits, but contented themselves with going an occasional round of the fields, so that they were ignorant as to how the lunatics were lodged or fed; and sometimes they would hear that a•" '• patient had died of a slow disease before they had been informed tfrat he was~ill. ' These revelations, when taken up by the Belgian Press, naturally produced a sensation, and a Royal Commission was appointed, which, it seems, has since set'the ! colony of Gheel to rights ; jtmt Buoh facts " will show how soon an excellent institu-;. tion may degenerate if the medical staff be incompetent or lazy. There cannot „p ossibly be a. better system for the treatment of lunatics than that theoretically prevailing at Gheel ; and if the regulations lately drawn up by the Royal Commission be enforced, the place will become once more a beneficent institution. But it did undoubtedly decline. some time ago,;, and it is a proof of. how much statistics are,- --■ worth that, at the time when the conditien of the place was at its worst, the official reports showed it to be in a splendid state of financial prosperity, the labor of the lunatics being more than enough to defray all expenses. A model asylum much commended at the recent Congress of Alienist Physicians '. ; in France is that of Clermont, Oise, .managed by MM. Labille Brothers. Here, again, the patients are employed at '' agricultural labor, and are boarded out in " ' large farms. The asylum is understate, control, being used, in fact, for the recep- .V tion of all pauper lunatics in the Oise j but there are detached pavilions surrounded with private gardens for the accommodation of patients who can y,- . afford to pay from £100 to £240 a 'Jki year. There are also workshops, where so,me of the lunatics are employed at manual crafts. All the arrangement at this place appear to be good ; for the lunatics are allowed to enjoy twothirds of their earnings, a small percentage being given them to buy small luxuries during their confinement, while the rest is remitted to them upon their " discharge or is bestowed for th.c suppprfj

of their families. Nothing can be better thah this ; but such liberality (economical liberality, after all, if the general results be considered) is very far from being common in. some other large asylums, which seem to bo conducted solely with a view to making lunatic labor profitable. It has been found that in some of these ~J places a skilled mechanic had the greatest difficulty in obtaining his discharge. He was employed to make boots, clothes, or furniture, and the more he worked so much the less inclined were the authorities to dismiss him ; and often the wretched fellow was not paid at all for his exertions. A commission instituted by the municipality of Lyons two years ago. discovered some deplorable abuses of this, nature in a large asylum of the Rhone. In the private residence of the chief physician they found a cook, a gardener, and a cabinetmaker, all three perfetly sane, though alleged lunatics, who were employed in unpaid service. The cabinetmaker, who was a clever artisan, had,- fabricated quite a^ collection of chairs, tables, and bureaus for his master ; and all this while hia family, who might easily have been supported by the proceeds of, his labor, had become chargeable to the . Bureau de Bienfaisance. When taxed with having done a very irregular thing, the doctor answered breezily that nis.three servants considered it a favor to work in his house ; and that had they been discontented with their lot they might easily have escaped from the asylum', since there was no restraint on them: . < ( It was found on inquiry, however,- that one of the servants had, after, recovering his reason, attempted to escape, and been severely punished foß.it, by "douches':' and confinement in a cell with a strait-waistcoat on ; in f actj the truth was. that the servants had only accepted drudgery in the doctor's house as an alternative to the worse fate of ;bemg shut up in the wards along with tK&/re#lly mad patients. This was a very ba& case indeed, and it is satisfactory to • add that the doctor was dismissed ; but his, ponduct only proves once again how r necessary "it is that asylums, should be inspected., of ten, and that the inspectors should .jkeep their eyes open during their; visits. „M. Maxime Dv Camp, in ; :thi£n;yw>rk: on Paris, deals exhaustivelyipMih the question of asylums, and Unfolds a plan of Baron Haussmann for building ten large model asylums near Paris, which should have completely done away with the private mflisons de sante. Three of these establishments—Ste. Anne, Vaucluse, and . .jTilled' Ayray-— were completed, but the jWori left office before he had time to buud the others, and thereby execute the whole of a scheme which would have • made France the foremost of nations in respect of this particular kind of charity. As it is, M. Dv Camp seems to be of opinion that his country has no asylum, not even that of Clermont, which fully realises the ideal of what a lunatic institution should be ; and he cites as a model to be copied the asylum of Illenau, near Achem, in the Grand Duchy of Baden. Dr Roller, who founded the place in 1837, an,d was still managing it two years ago, xofia.de' it a rule to receive no more than 800 patients ; and his staff was composed of 17&* attendants, ten physicians, and six medical students. The attendants were all. carefully selected and well paid ; and the physicians were all required to live among the patients all hours of the day. Dr Roller himself did so; and he required that wherever and however the lunatics were employed, whether at work or at play,Hhere should be two or three doctors among them to exeroise a control over the warders and set them an example of kindness and good manners. Not only that, but Dr. Roller busied himself about his patients after their discharge; for he corresponded with their friends periodically, until he was' assured that a perfect cure had been effected ; and if he heard 'that a former patient was ailing he sent one of his doctors to see him, or went himself, without caring what the distance might be and without charging anything for his visit. Here was a genuine philan--thropiet; and the excellence of his *" Byetenv was proved by the fact that among the patients who were discharged from his asylum the average of relapses was, only four per cent. In Borne of, the French departmental asylums the average i 5,25 per cent., and in private maisons de sq,nf.e it is said to "be even higher. It cannot be expected of all asylum doctors ttiat they should be devoted philanthropists; but something might at least be done, to; make them all adhere to duties plainly marked out for them by regulations more stringent and sensible than any which now exist for the governance of asylums.