the insane or to his discharge therefrom.

The abuses possible under the present loose system are only too obvious,
the opportunity offered to fraud and crime only too apparent. Putting
troublesome relatives in lunatic asylums might be considered an easy way
of getting rid of them by those who are too tender-hearted or too
cowardly to murder them outright. It is scarcely more merciful.
Frequently the request for incarceration is not brought before a court
or jury at all. A commission of insanity experts is summoned by the
alleged lunatic's relatives, and if they are satisfied that the patient
is of unsound mind they sign a paper committing him or her to some
institution. Sometimes the signature of one physician only is
sufficient, and in fraudulent cases, where the persons calling in the
physicians are keenly interested in the result, everything is done to
make out a _bona-fide_ case, and prove the patient out of his or her
mind. Harried, nervous, fearful of everybody and everything, the
slightest lapse from control or commonplace speech is used for the
patient's undoing.

The mental anguish and actual suffering that a sane person must
necessarily undergo when suddenly deprived of his liberty and brutally
incarcerated in some lugubrious, lonely sanitarium can better be
imagined than described. To know that one is in perfect health and yet
compelled to associate with poor creatures whose minds are really
shattered, forced to listen to their senseless chatter all day and to
hear their blood-curdling screams all night, to be under constant
surveillance, an object of distrust and pity, subject to a severe and
humiliating discipline, punished by the dreaded cold-water douche when
refractory--all this is enough to make a madman of the sanest person.
And when, added to these horrors, the unfortunate victim sees himself
deserted by all, deprived of means to employ a lawyer, knowing that the
enemies responsible for his misfortune are squandering his money and
profiting by his misery, is it a wonder that in a moment of
discouragement and desperation he abandons hope and does away with
himself? Then the indifferent world sagely wags its head and accepts
without questioning the coroner's verdict: "Killed by his own hand in a
fit of suicidal mania."

Among the larger private insane asylums in New York State, the
institution "Sea Rest" at Tocquencke, bore a fairly good reputation.
That is to say, the skirts of the management had