This question of insanity has all along been a serious one to Otago, and indeed to the whole of New Zealand, not because this kind of malady has prevailed here more than in other places, but because of the shameful extent to which weak-minded and mentally impaired persons have been deported from the Home country by their relatives or others, and shunted on to the colony. Even now, notwithstanding the mortality that in the course of nature has taken place in the Asylum, there are friendless men and women who arrived long years ago, and who still bid fair to live for many years. As a matter of fact, the inmates of the Asylum live long. They are well housed, well fed, well clothed, are kept scrupulously clean, generally speaking they are free from care and worry, they are not subject to the risks connected with free life—the risks of accident or of disease by infection or exposure or excess, the work done by those of them who are capable of any service is of a healthful kind, and the careful nursing of the sick and really suffering is all that could be desired, and beyond what the outside world is aware of. In a word, all that makes up daily life in the asylum tends to long life, and, as a rule, death is the result of old age, or epilepsy, or other disease originating in the brain. All this is as it ought to be in the case of hapless beings who, from whatever cause, have been deprived of their reason; but it is nevertheless matter for regret that a prohibitive law was not from the first put in force that would have prevented heartless people in the Home country from freeing themselves of family burdens at the expense of the Province or of the colony—not to speak of the cruelty of ruthlessly sending the weak-minded or mentally afflicted away from all family connections and home associations to the extreme ends of the earth for the mere selfish purpose of getting rid of them. Taking into account the number of those who from time to time have been cast as helpless burdens upon our shores, and the cost of their maintenance throughout all the years, the expense so wrongfully imposed upon the colony must in the aggregate have been very great.
As time went by the three unfortunates located in the Hospital were added to, and in 1862 the number of insane men and women held in restraint was between twenty and thirty. A few were domiciled in the gaol, but most of them were in the
