Eloquently did Daniel Defoe protest against the abuses of asylums in his day.[101] The "True-Born Englishman" reprobates the practice of men sending their wives to mad-houses at every whim or dislike, in order that they might be undisturbed in their evil ways. He asserts that this custom had got to such a head that the private mad-houses were greatly on the increase in and near London. He might well characterize this system as "the height of barbarity and injustice," and worse than "a clandestine inquisition," and say that these houses, if not suppressed, should at least be subjected to examination. "Is it not enough," he asks, "to make any one mad to be suddenly clapped up, stripped, whipped, ill fed, and worse used?" He says, "If this tyrannical inquisition, joined with the reasonable reflections a woman of any common understanding must necessarily make, be not sufficient to drive any soul stark-staring mad, though before they were never so much in their right senses, I have no more to say." He asks the reader to indulge for once the doting of an old man while he lays down his remedy, and not to charge him with the ambition to be a lawgiver. Defoe goes at once to the point, and says that it should be no less than felony to confine any person, under pretence of madness, without due authority. He calls upon Queen Caroline to begin her auspicious reign with an action worthy of herself. Addressing the ladies, he says, "Who can deny when you become suitors? and who knows but at your request a Bill may be brought into the House to regulate these abuses?" Defoe little knew the prejudice any reasonable measure would arouse when he added, "I am sure no honest member in either honourable House will be against so reasonable a Bill; the business is for some public-spirited patriot to break the ice by bringing it into the House, and I dare lay my life it passes." He would have infallibly lost it. This naturally brings us to the question of what has been done by legislation, both for protecting the subject from being unjustly incarcerated on the plea of insanity, and for the protection of lunatics when confined in asylums. The only Act of Parliament, up to the year 1808, which bore upon the care and protection of the lunatic poor was that passed in the year 1744, in the seventeenth year of George II. (17 Geo. II., c. 5). This authorizes any two justices to apprehend them, and have them securely locked up and, as might be expected, chained. The contrast between the spirit and the provisions of such an Act, and that passed a century later, under the auspices of Lord Shaftesbury, brings into strong relief the solid advance which has been made in a century, in the face of constant opposition from interested persons, as well as that which arises out of the mere apathy and lethargy of a large class of the community.