We submit, then, that the clinic system is a decided advance in the treatment of mental disorder which other countries have adopted while for years we have stood by with folded hands.[89] From the humanitarian and the scientific point of view there is everything to be said in favour of the clinic. The practical Englishman will, however, ask “What about the financial aspect? Are not these institutions, with their heavy proportion of doctors and nurses to patients, prohibitively expensive?” The answer to this question is that certainly the clinic is relatively more expensive than the asylum. But since the function of the clinic is to save as many patients as possible from entering the asylum, it is obvious that its expense must be judged from a special standpoint. The maintenance of a repair shop is always comparatively costly, whether the material to be mended be human or not. The cost per day of repairing a motor car is usually distinctly higher than the daily charge for garaging it in its broken-down state. Yet we gladly pay the higher charge for the simple reasons that a motor car in its garage is of no use to us, and that the daily charge for housing the car would amount to a colossal figure if paid for many years. Cannot we apply the same reasoning to the case of the mentally disordered human being? This is to take the very lowest view of the value of the individual to the community. Yet it would seem that the British public, so far, has been impervious even to this financial consideration. But, it may still be asked, cannot the doctors in the asylums carry out the work suggested? The answer to this is, that apart from the undesirability of allowing a patient suffering from a mild mental disorder to be associated with an institution housing the definitely insane, it is a physical impossibility for the asylum doctors to do this work so long as the present proportion of doctors to patients remains unchanged. How many members of the British public realise the fact that it is quite usual for an asylum doctor to be in charge of at least 400 patients, and that this number sometimes rises to 600? When it is remembered that insane patients are even more prone than the average person to suffer from physical ailments, and that their mental disorders are infinitely complicated by the delay incurred before they come under medical care, it becomes clear that the doctor who would succeed in treating such patients individually would require titanic energy and the addition of at least twenty-four more hours to each of his working days. We cannot therefore compare the staff of a clinic with that of a British asylum, for the staff of the latter is lamentably and obviously too small. Regarding the financial aspect of the question we may quote again from Dr. Rows’ article:—