The question of the adoption in Ireland of family care as a method of dealing with mental unsoundness is at once highly academic and highly practical: academic because this mode of treatment has never been hitherto attempted in that country; and practical, because it may be said, with a slight modification of a familiar line, that no nation wants it so much. Perhaps all this is only another way of saying that the question stands exactly in that position in which any earnest and vigorous reformer likes to take a subject up. The crop is ripe, but no sickle has yet swept over the field.