AN EXPENSIVE LUNATIC.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVI, Issue 2136, 11 March 1908, Page 1

AN EXPENSIVE LUNATIC.

Lionel Terry is an expensive luxury (says the N.Z. “Times”). Ho is costing this colony nearly as much as a Cabinet Minister. A Southern exchange.says lie is located in a comfort-ably-furnished room with a fire-place, and has three warders appointed to look after him, two in the daytime, and one at night. A doctor from the Sunnyside is to visit him at regular intervals. No doubt lie is well supplied with nourishing literature, and has plenty of pens and paper to. write his daily diary, and if .lie smokes lie is no doiibt humored with an occasional box of good cigars. This pampered lunatic —if he is a lunatic—must be costing tho Dominiou something like £750 a year. There is about £650 worth of warder in attendance, rent, fuel, and firing will cost'anotlier £SO, and medical attendance and other etceteras half a hundred more. Even with all this output ho is not either as useful or interesting from a natural history point of view as the lion at the Newtown zoo. If Lionel Terry had been clapped into the prison gang and made to work—work hard—it would have improved him both mentally and physically. Employment is a grand palladium for distracted minds, but no, he is being made a hero, with sympathetic- newspaper paragraphs about the state of his health, and he is being pampered and cared for at public expense! If Terry bad killed a respectable citizen, or even a politician, he would probably have got short shift, but having murdered a harmless, decrepit Chinaman in a theatrical way, lip is petted and made much of. As for his alleged dementia, too much is being made of it. Terry is no more mad than the ordinary criminal.