The writer asserts that persons may be and are taken forcibly to these houses without any authority, instantly seized by a set of inhuman ruffians trained up to this barbarous profession, stripped naked, and conveyed to a dark room. If the patient complains, the attendant brutishly orders him not to rave, calls for assistants, and ties him down to a bed, from which he is not released till he submits to their pleasure. Next morning a doctor is gravely introduced, who, taking the report of the keeper, pronounces the unfortunate person a lunatic, and declares he must be reduced by physic. He is deprived of all communication with the outer world, and denied the use of pen and paper. Such usage, the writer goes on to say, without a formal warrant, is too much even for the Inquisition in Spain or Portugal, and cries aloud for redress in a land of liberty. One circumstance brought forcibly out is similar to that which, occurring at York some years afterwards (1791), led, as we shall see, to the foundation of an institution in which a directly opposite course was pursued. "Patients," he says, "often cannot be found out, because the master lets them bear some fictitious names in the house; and if fortunately discovered by a friend, the master, or his servants, will endeavour to elude his search and defeat his humane intentions by saying _they have strict orders to permit no person to see the patient_." At an earlier period a lady was sent by her husband to a private asylum simply because she was extravagant and dissipated. The account of this affair is in manuscript, dated 1746, but the substance of it is given by a gentleman in _Notes and Queries_, May 5, 1866. Two or three girls were placed in the same house, in order to break off love affairs disapproved by their friends. Again, I observe the following entry in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ under date Sunday, August 6, 1769:--"A gentleman near Whitehall, by the assistance of four ruffians, forced his lady into a hackney coach, and ordered the coachman to drive to a private mad-house, and there to be confined." The _Gentleman's Magazine_ writer's remedy for "a condition compared with which none is so deeply calamitous; no distress so truly miserable; no object so deserving of compassion, and none so worthy of redress," was a really effective Bill for the regulation of private mad-houses.