One other feature of the history of this movement in Ireland has already been alluded to, but merits attention again, and that is the additional proof afforded of the inevitable tendency to the accumulation of cases, instead of their recovery on a large scale, as was at first hoped and expected, not in Ireland alone, but in England. The frequency of relapse was, in the outburst of delight accompanying the recovery of some cases hopelessly incurable under the old system, not suspected, and the bitter disappointment which this fact involves had yet to be experienced, and is, indeed, scarcely realised at this moment. In one of the Irish Reports, the circumstance is alluded to that, taking all the discharges of patients on account of recovery, the cures amounted to the gratifying number of seventy per cent. Had this proportion been sustained, and had these patients retained their mental health, there would have been little need of additional asylums. Patients from all quarters, their homes, poor-houses, and even jails, might have been drafted for a season into these temples of health, and, having passed the charmed threshold, been restored in a few months to the outer world, never to return. If this pleasant illusion is dispelled by the course of events in Ireland, how much more strikingly must it be so in England? for the former country is almost altogether free from that most hopeless of all mental affections, the general paralysis of the insane--the plague of all other civilized countries--and has fewer epileptics. There are now in Ireland 43 district and private asylums, with a population of insane persons amounting to 9289. There are 163 poor-houses in which there are insane and idiotic persons. The insane under the jurisdiction of the Inspectors on the 1st of January, 1881, were thus distributed:-- In district asylums 8,667 In the Dundrum or Criminal Asylum 180 At Palmerston House 19[288] In private licensed houses 622[289] In 163 union workhouses 3,573 ------ Total 13,061[290] As many as 1270 patients were received as dangerous lunatics under the 30 and 31 Vict., c. 118.