T New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1885.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XX, Issue 6828, 5 October 1883, Page 4

T New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1885.

Pdblic attention has been aroused by the deplorable tragedy which has just occurred at the Lunatic Asylum. We have no desire to anticipate the inquiry that is pending, or prejudge a case the full details of which may not be in our possession. But there are salient features in the occurrence to which no one can close his eyes. There is at all times a sorrowful interest attaching to a hospital for the insane. The malady is the saddest that can fall upon man, and there is a pitiful tenderness extended to the sufferers by it that is probably felt for no other affliction. It is at all times a sore trial to relations and friends to send one of their loved members away from them to be kept under restraint in a lunatic asylum, but the promptings of affection yield to anxiety and a sense of duty, and despite the yearnings of love, the afflicted son or daughter, or aged father or mother is sent away, for what 1 For their safety ! But now our ideas are rudely shocked, and we learn that the helpless.victims of dethroned reason are shut up within walls in company with men who are enclosed there for the safety of the public without, because their insane promptings have made them slay a fellow-man, and because the same homicidal mania may prompt them to slay more. We care not what may be the result of the inquiry, whether the wa.rderhas disobeyed orders, or the regulations are defective, the classification incomplete, or the discipline lax. We have the one fact staring us in the face, that our most helpless and pitiable fellow-citizens are forcibly shut up, and detained against their will in. the society and companionship of murdering madmen, who are too dangerous to be let loose on society outside the walls of a madhouse. The homicidal maniac is as dangerous as the murderer, and more so. The latter we hang to save society from further danger; the former we detain apart from society "during Her Majesty's pleasure'" for society's safety, add we put him in along with the helpless victims of innocent delusions. This is the bald fact, and it is enough to make the blood run cold.

It may be that it is as just as it ia humane . that insanity should be pleaded as a bar to execution ; it may be that a man who kills another -when under delusions should not be hanged ; but certainly the public safety demands that a man who has done so should never be afforded an opportunity of perpetrating another deed of the kind, even if it were necessary to place him in. an iron cage, and keep him there like a wild beast. There is no more moral responsibility in such a homicidal maniac than there is in the case of a " man-eating" tio-er and the man, or men, or system that can allow either abroad to gratify thp thirst for blood, can be fairly chargeable with the death that has resulted. We are quite well aware that the Asylum is overcrowded, that there is too little accommodation, too few at-

tendants, that these complaints have often enough been^piade,. and their truth admitted by the Inspector of Lunatic Asylums in his report to Parliament. . But if all this was ten times as bad, it is no excuse whatever for letting loose among helpless lunatics this one wild beast, who had slain one man without provocation or warning and was only biding opportunity and, the ' order" of his insane promptings to kill another. Indeed the lunatic I Asylum was not the place for such a creature at all, and it seems to have very much the appearand of a desire on the part of the Gaol authorities to save themselves from the bother of beeping him, when they had him transferred to . the lunatic Asylum. Xhe. man was under restraint because ot his man-slaying proclivities, and for

the safety of \his - fellow 'beings; and I the Gaol was the proper place for htm sHis own welfare and his mental or physical condition. should liave been a very secondary consideration, and unless there was a gaol ward in the Lunatic Asylum, where the man's perpetual imprisonment and seclusion, could have been effectually carried out, he should never have been sent there. If the means of classification at the Lunatic Asylum are so deficient that; a homicide by practice and by instinct cannot be kept in seclusion, then the Gaol was the lunatic ward for him, and whoever may have moved the Colonial Secretary to haye the manslayer transferred to the Asylum, there to herd with defenceless men, should be held responsible for the result. That it may have been done by law, and according to all the formalities of the Lunatics' Act, is beside the question. The law assumes that there is ordinary common sense in man, and that legal machinery is put in motion by the hand of discretion.

"We trust that the enquiiry into this case will' be no perfunctory business. The public and the public safety demand that the crime of this poor man's death be sheeted home. It is not enough to say that the Gaol has not this, and the Asylum has not that; poor Mills has been murdered, and it will be the business of the enquiry to say by whom.