mfort and peace of mind was torture. They were
typical eighteen-dollar-a-month attendants. Another of the same sort,
on one occasion, cursed me with a degree of brutality which I prefer
not to recall, much less record. And a few days later the climax was
appropriately capped when still another attendant perpetrated an
outrage which a sane man would have resented to the point of homicide.
He was a man of the coarsest type. His hands would have done credit to
a longshoreman--fingers knotted and nearly twice the normal size.
Because I refused to obey a peremptory command, and this at a time when
I habitually refused even on pain of imagined torture to obey or to
speak, this brute not only cursed me with abandon, he deliberately spat
upon me. I was a mental incompetent, but like many others in a similar
position I was both by antecedents and by training a gentleman. Vitriol
could not have seared my flesh more deeply than the venom of this human
viper stung my soul! Yet, as I was rendered speechless by delusions, I
could offer not so much as a word of protest. I trust that it is not
now too late, however, to protest in behalf of the thousands of
outraged patients in private and state hospitals whose mute submission
to such indignities has never been recorded.

Of the readiness of an unscrupulous owner to employ inferior
attendants, I shall offer a striking illustration. The capable
attendant who acted as my protector at this sanatorium has given me an
affidavit embodying certain facts which, of course, I could not have
known at the time of their occurrence. The gist of this sworn statement
is as follows: One day a man--seemingly a tramp--approached the main
building of the sanatorium and inquired for the owner. He soon found
him, talked with him a few minutes, and an hour or so later he was
sitting at the bedside of an old and infirm man. This aged patient had
recently been committed to the institution by relatives who had labored
under the common delusion that the payment of a considerable sum of
money each week would insure kindly treatment. When this
tramp-attendant first appeared, all his visible worldly possessions
were contained in a small bundle which he carried under his arm. So
filthy were his person and his clothes that he received a compulsory
bath and another suit before being assigned to duty. He then began to
earn his four dollars and fifty cents a week by sitting several hours a
day in the room with the aged m