nd proceeded as follows: "I take pleasure in informing you that I am
in the Crazy Business and am holding my job down with ease and a fair
degree of grace. Being in the Crazy Business, I understand certain
phases of the business about which you know nothing. You as Governor
are at present 'head devil' in this 'hell,' though I know you are
unconsciously acting as 'His Majesty's' 1st Lieutenant."

I then launched into my arraignment of the treatment of the insane. The
method, I declared, was "wrong from start to finish. The abuses
existing here exist in every other institution of the kind in the
country. They are all alike--though some of them are of course worse
than others. Hell is hell the world over, and I might also add that
hell is only a great big bunch of disagreeable details anyway. That's
all an Insane Asylum is. If you don't believe it, just go crazy and
take up your abode here. In writing this letter I am laboring under no
mental excitement. I am no longer subjected to the abuses about which I
complain. I am well and happy. In fact I never was so happy as I am
now. Whether I am in perfect mental health or not, I shall leave for
you to decide. If I am insane to-day I hope I may never recover my
Reason."

First I assailed the management of the private institution where I had
been strait-jacketed and referred to "Jekyll-Hyde" as "Dr.----, M.D.
(Mentally Deranged)." Then followed an account of the strait-jacket
experience; then an account of abuses at the State Hospital. I
described in detail the most brutal assault that fell to my lot. In
summing up I said, "The attendants claimed next day that I had called
them certain names. Maybe I did--though I don't believe I did at all.
What of it? This is no young ladies' boarding school. Should a man be
nearly killed because he swears at attendants who swear like pirates? I
have seen at least fifteen men, many of them mental and physical
wrecks, assaulted just as brutally as I was, and usually without a
cause. I know that men's lives have been shortened by these brutal
assaults. And that is only a polite way of saying that murder has been
committed here." Turning next to the matter of the women's wards, I
said: "A patient in this ward--a man in his right mind, who leaves here
on Tuesday next--told me that a woman patient told him that she had
seen many a helpless woman dragged along the floor by her hair, and had
also seen them choked by attendants who used a wet towel a