H.—2o

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supply hot freshly-cooked meat to attendants, to invade the patients' supply, and to make this up to them by handing over the cold residue from the attendants' tables for the patients' breakfast. This practice was stopped. It appears from the paragraph below* that samples purporting to have been meals of patients at Seacliff were secured by the representative of the Globe newspaper. I feel that it would be out of place'for me to comment here upon the inevitable dishonesty involved in such a statement. On the one hand we have the deliberate corruption of a public servant, and on the other the deprivation of food resulting from the abstraction of a patient's ration from the dining-hall. Why was an open and honest application not made to see the patients at dinner? No such scales as reported ever existed here, but the meaning of the so-called first and fourth classes may be explained as having some foundation. Until recently the partition of the food into rations proportionate to the requirements of the various individuals was left for the most part to the judgment of the attendants ; but this seemed to be an undesirable arrangement, because there was a tendency for each attendant to try and get the lion's share for the patients under him. I therefore carefully considered each patient's case with the head-attendant, and the dietaries of chronic patients were arranged in four grades according to their special requirements. II. — Bodily Environments. — A certain degree of Light and Warmth. (1.) Light. —A larger number of men are kept in the open air instead of being inside the building or in high-walled airing-courts ; and at the north end of the Asylum a large area has been enclosed (with sft. open pickets) for women, and laid out with flower-beds, shell-paths, and lawn, a portion of which is daily used for croquet. A long verandah has been, erected in the same yard, with work-tables, &c, in order to enable women to do sewing and knitting in the open air in summer. An expenditure of about £25 was incurred in this direction. Although many patients remain up till 8.30 p.m., playing billiards, &o. (whereas they used to go to bed at 7 p.m.), and a larger number of lamps are used in the rooms and corridors throughout the building, and in the hall on dance and entertainment-nights, the kerosene bill has considerably decreased. The reason of this is that formerly large quantities of kerosene disappeared through there being no lock on the kerosene store and attendants using it freely for lighting fires. (Appendix X.) (2.) Warmth. —The temperature of rooms not specially heated falls in winter far below the standard which should be maintained for many of the acutely-insane and for invalids or old decrepit persons. The risks attendant upon allowing open fires, guarded only by iron gratings, to lunatics at night are too great to permit of our using fireplaces where they exist in bed-rooms, except in special cases, and then attendants have to sit up to watch the fires rather than the patients. (Appendix L.) For the last few months female patients have had the benefit of seventeen rooms heated to about 60 deg. Fahr. by means of hot-water pipes, the apparatus for which had been lying useless in Wellington for six or seven years, having been imported for the purpose of maintaining a genial warmth in the cells of prisoners who were to be kept in a projected central convict-prison at New Plymouth. Before next winter the New Plymouth apparatus will have been completely fitted up, and we shall have bedrooms for about sixty or seventy patients efficiently heated. The apparatus having been sent from Wellington, we do not know the cost of this improvement. Formerly few fires were allowed in the daytime owing to the risks entailed, but now extra precautions are observed and a large number of fires are maintained in winter. Cleanliness. —No effort is spared to maintain as high a standard of cleanliness as possible under the very unfavorable circumstances with which we have to contend in having no adequate watersupply. The latter subject is fully dealt with in Appendix M, and as the spring there referred to has been purchased we only await the passing of a grant for, say, £1,000 in order to proceed with the necessary works. At the latter end of 1889 a sum of about £50 was expended in fitting up a large room with baths, shampooing apparatus, &0., in terms of letter. (Appendix N.) Since that time the old practice of bathing two men in a bath at once has been absolutely disallowed, and the shampooing lias done away with the necessity of washing the face and head of a patient in water which had already been used by another. 111. — Exercise, Recreation, Best (bodily and mental). (1.) Exercise and Recreation (bodily and mental). —The various outdoor works on which the men are engaged—such as bush-falling, bush-grubbing, wood-carrying, farm, garden, and dairy work, earth-work, handicrafts, &o. —partake almost as largely of the element of recreation as they do of work. Patients are not, on the average, engaged in these occupations more than five or six hours a day, are usually allowed two spells in the day for smoking, and for the most part do their work in a somewhat leisurely fashion. Even although a man cannot be induced to do any work, he is sent out with a working gang if possible, merely for the sake of the benefit which arises from keeping him in the open air.

*We have, however, seen samples of food supplied for dinner to a first-class patient, and we have not the slightest hesitation in denouncing the mess of potatoes, cabbage, and miserable little pieces of fat, scraggy, and disgusting looking mutton as unfit for patients' use. Only the hungriest of hungry men would care about devouring it. On this point we have taken some pains to obtain the dietary scales for first- and fourth-class patients, and here they are in all their naked grandeur : First-class patients. —Breakfast: A pint of porridge, with separated milk ; a ninth part of a 41b. loaf, with a little butter and a little chopped meat. (From the sample of this last shown to us we can honestly say we have seen much better thrown to dogs). Dinner: One pint of soup and a plate of meat, &c, aa above described. On Sundays a piece of pudding. Tea: Three-eighteenths of a 41b. loaf, thinly buttered. No tea at dinner time, plenty at other timgs, but poor in quality. Fourth-class patients. —Breakfast: An eighteenth part of a 41b. loaf, very thinly buttered ; one pint of porridge with separated milk, and a pint of weak tea. Dinner: One pint of meat soup three times per week, with potatoes, cabbage, or turnips. Vegetable soup four times a week, with potatoes and cabbage or turnips. No meat, but a piece of .pudding, known as " duff," on Sundays. Tea: A ninth part of a 41b. loaf with butter, and a pint of very poor tea. It will thus be seen that if these scales are rigidly adhered to, patients at Seacliff are not likely to get either too strong or too fat. But, judging by the samples secured by our representative, they are not followed at all.