It should be stated that a Select Committee had been appointed (moved for by Mr. Wynn) five years before (1806), to inquire into the state of pauper lunatics in England. This Committee proposed the erection of asylums in different parts of the kingdom, power being given to the magistrates of any county to charge the expense upon the county rate, all pauper lunatics within the district being conveyed thither and maintained at the expense of their respective parishes, and it was recommended that no asylum should contain more than 300 patients. At that time there were 1765 lunatics in workhouses, or houses of industry, 483 in private custody, 113 in houses of correction, and 27 in gaols; total, 2248.[125] Sir George Paul, who took an active interest in this Committee, stated, in a letter to the Secretary of State, that there was hardly a parish of any considerable extent in which there might not be found some unfortunate human creature, who, if his ill-treatment had made him "frenetic," was chained in the cellar or garret of a workhouse, fastened to the leg of a table, tied to a post in an outhouse, or perhaps shut up in an uninhabited ruin; or, if his lunacy were inoffensive, was left to ramble, half-naked and half-starved, through the streets and highways, teased by the rabble, and made the jest of the vulgar, ignorant, and unfeeling. "I have witnessed," he says, "instances of each of these modes of securing lunatics, under the Act 17 Geo. II., c. 5. Of all the lunatics in the kingdom, the one half are not under any kind of protection from ill-treatment, or placed in a situation to be relieved of their malady." In the following year (1808) an Act (48 Geo. III., c. 96) was passed, providing that it should be lawful for justices in every county in England and Wales to take into consideration the propriety of providing a lunatic asylum for the reception of patients within the county. Referring to the Act 17 Geo. II. for the committal of vagrant lunatics, the new Act provided that in case there should be an asylum established for the county within which the lunatic belonged, then a warrant should be issued for the removal of such lunatic to the asylum, and not elsewhere; but if no asylum had been erected, then he was to be confined in any house duly licensed under the authority of the Act of 14 Geo. III. It will be seen that this legislation was not compulsory, and therefore utterly failed in attaining the object of its promoters. It only authorized magistrates to act. This Act was amended in some points of importance in 1811.[126] Overseers were obliged to produce a certificate of a medical man as to the state of the lunatic. Justices were to make returns to the quarter sessions of the cases brought before them, and medical superintendents returns of the state of persons intrusted to their care, at least once a year.