Note 158 — Chapter IV · COURSE OF LUNACY LEGISLATION.

In 1827 Sir A. Halliday wrote: "This Act, the inadequacy of which has long been ascertained and fully exposed, is still the only law by which mad-houses are licensed and regulated in England and Wales.... That it has remained so long upon the statute book must hereafter excite astonishment; and that even now, there should exist so much difficulty in having it altered and amended, is a fact scarcely to be credited. Yet such is the fact; and thousands of our fellow-men have been hurried to an untimely grave, in all the horrors of raving madness or helpless fatuity, without its being possible to get their condition altered or amended, merely because certain (we hope mistaken) prejudices were entertained by an exalted individual whose voice was long paramount in the senate; and we had almost added, through the influence of those who have realized immense fortunes as wholesale dealers and traffickers in this species of human misery."