d telling their kind of stories. The attendants needed
regular exercise quite as much as the patients and when they failed to
employ their energy in this healthful way, they were likely to use it
at the expense of the bodily comfort of their helpless charges.

If lack of exercise produced a need of discipline, each disciplinary
move, on the other hand, served only to inflame us the more. Some wild
animals can be clubbed into a semblance of obedience, yet it is a
treacherous obedience at best, and justly so. And that is the only kind
of obedience into which a _man_ can be clubbed. To imagine otherwise of
a human being, sane or insane, is the very essence of insanity itself.
A temporary leisure may be won for the aggressor, but in the long run
he will be put to greater inconvenience than he would be by a more
humane method. It was repression and wilful frustration of reasonable
desires which kept me a seeming maniac and made seeming maniacs of
others. Whenever I was released from lock and key and permitted to
mingle with the so-called violent patients, I was surprised to find
that comparatively few were by nature troublesome or noisy. A patient,
calm in mind and passive in behavior three hundred and sixty days in
the year, may, on one of the remaining days, commit some slight
transgression, or, more likely, be goaded into one by an attendant or
needlessly led into one by a tactless physician. His indiscretion may
consist merely in an unmannerly announcement to the doctor of how
lightly the latter is regarded by the patient. At once he is banished
to the violent ward, there to remain for weeks, perhaps indefinitely.

XXII

Like fires and railroad disasters, assaults seemed to come in groups.
Days would pass without a single outbreak. Then would come a veritable
carnival of abuse--due almost invariably to the attendants' state of
mind, not to an unwonted aggressiveness on the part of the patients. I
can recall as especially noteworthy several instances of atrocious
abuse. Five patients were chronic victims. Three of them, peculiarly
irresponsible, suffered with especial regularity, scarcely a day
passing without bringing to them its quota of punishment. One of these,
almost an idiot, and quite too inarticulate to tell a convincing story
even under the most favorable conditions, became so cowed that,
whenever an attendant passed, he would circle his oppressor as a
whipped cur circles a cruel master. If this avoidan