The interior accommodation, fittings, and furniture are, if not abominably bad, excessively defective: and on reaching this part of the Report, where the details of internal fittings and management come under review, the impression derivable from its perusal is akin to that gathered from the revelations of madhouses made by the Parliamentary Committees of 1814 and 1815. The sketch of the evils suffered by lunatics in workhouses, which we have ourselves attempted in past pages, tells a flattering tale compared with the realities unfolded to us by the Commissioners, and adds a tenfold force to the arguments against the detention of lunatics in such places. To continue the practice would be to perpetuate a blot upon the internal polity, the philanthropy and the Christianity of the country. Let those who would know the whole case refer to the Report in question; it is sufficient for our purpose to attempt a mere outline of its revelations. Patients are frequently kept in bed because there are no suitable seats for them; a tub at times answers the double purpose of a urinal and a wash-basin; a privy is partitioned off in a small dormitory; baths are almost unknown; a trough or sink common to all supplies the want of basins for washing, and an outhouse or the open air furnishes the appropriate place for personal ablutions. Clothing, again, is often ragged and insufficient; in an unwarmed dormitory, a single blanket, or only a coverlet, is all the covering afforded by night; loose straw in a trough bedstead usually constitutes the bed for wet and dirty patients to nestle in; and whether the bed be straw or not, the practice of using it night after night, when "filthy with dirt, and often rotting from frequent wetting, has been many times animadverted upon." In some workhouses two male patients are constantly placed in the same bed; nor is the character of the bedfellows much heeded; for a sane and insane, two idiots, one clean and one dirty, and even two dirty inmates, have been found associated together in the same bed, occasionally in a state of complete nudity.
Further, the want of exercise and employment, the absence of supervision and control, and the entrusting of means of coercion to irresponsible and unfit attendants, lead to the most shocking abuse of restraint, and to cruel seclusion.