#goodna

The charges sustained, seven in number, are practically all the outcome of the Tory policy of "keeping a tight rein on the State finances," as the exercise of economies in this direction is usually described by those who defend such a practice. Overcrowding, insufficient bathing and washing accommodation, insufficiency of towels and defective sanitary arrangements—allegations which the report accepts as well-founded—while they do not reflect upon the officials in charge of the hospital, do most clearly and seriously impugh the administrations that have failed to provde the money neccessary to remedy such a state of affairs.

Referring to the overcrowded state of the wards, the Commissioner says: "This, I think, was the main, if not the entire cause of most of the unsatisfactory conditions found to exist." One of the wards, it is pointed out, was built in 1863, and condemned as long ago as 1893, while the attention of the Governments of the day was drawn to this most important state of affairs by both the present and the late superintendent. That the matter was urgent is evidenced by a portion of the report which reads: "The building is 52 years old, is admittedly out of date, nobody defends it, and it was described by witnesses (including the visiting justice and medical visitor) as unfit for human habitation, in which statement I agree."

Such an emphatic declaration has only one meaning. It stands out as an indictment of the Tory administrations of many years past and as a decided verdict of guilty against them also for a gross and inhuman neglect of duty that cannot be condoned in any way whatsoever.

To crowd the mentally unfit into wards utterly beyond their capacity to decently accommodate them—one ward capable of taking 100 patients had 245 in it in August, 1913, and 344 in it in April, 1914—the while smug Treasurers peregrinate through the constituencies talking about the wonderful Tory statemanship that was always able to boast a surplus, may appeal to the Tory mind as a spectacle that has nothing in it about which one need take exception, but the average elector, we imagine will regard the practice differently.

On the other aspect of the findings of the report—that of the wild and irresponsible ravings of a section of the local press—there is little to be said. The charges maid, put in the most sensational dressings, contained, in many instances, their own refutation. Some of them, the report avers, were not supported by any evidence, and others were refuted by evidence to the contrary.