As to public asylums, the evidence brought forward convinced the Committee that little alteration was required in the law, they being "well looked after and carefully attended to." It was suggested that they might be in some instances too large, and the staff of attendants too small and not sufficiently paid. Also that it might be desirable to erect, in connection with them, detached buildings of a simple and inexpensive character for the reception of imbecile and chronic patients. It was considered that the chief evil for which a remedy was required lay in the detention of a large number of pauper lunatics in workhouses, amounting to 68,000 January 1st, 1857, and 7632 on January 1st, 1859. "It cannot be denied that, with regard to those who are really lunatics, there is a great absence of proper supervision, attendance, and medical treatment. In some workhouses there are not even separate wards; mechanical restraint is frequently applied, because the imperfect state of the accommodation will not admit of a better mode of treatment; in many cases, the medical officers of a union cannot have the special knowledge requisite for the management of the insane; and it may generally be concluded that the special appliances of a union workhouse are not by any means equivalent, as to this class of inmates, to those of a lunatic asylum." The Committee did not recommend the removal of all cases, but that no person should be detained in a workhouse respecting whose sanity a doubt existed, without a medical certificate, renewable quarterly; that there should be distinct wards for such patients, with distinct attendance; that the guardians should visit such patients once a quarter, and make a special entry of their condition; that the Commissioners should visit them at least once a year; and that the same power of removing any patient to an asylum should be given to the Commissioners as that possessed by the justices. Lord Shaftesbury on this occasion recommended that magistrates should be empowered to provide asylums by money raised on the security of the rates, for all the non-pauper classes. "When I look into the whole matter," he said, "I see that the principle of profit vitiates the whole thing; it is at the bottom of all these movements that we are obliged to counteract by complicated legislation, and if we could but remove that principle of making a profit, we should confer an inestimable blessing upon the middle classes, getting rid of half the legislation, and securing an admirable, sound, and efficient system of treatment of lunacy." The Committee, however, while encouraging such asylums founded on private contributions, could not recommend that a burden should be imposed on the ratepayers, or that their establishment should be compulsory. The Committee suggested as safeguards against the improper detention of lunatics in private asylums (after dismissing the proposal to require the sanction of a magistrate) various important precautions.