A letter has reached my hands about these experiences of mine, written in a courteous spirit, but supplying so singular a comment on my story that I shall answer it here. It is from a specialist, who has obtained, I conclude, some eminence in the treatment of insanity; for it encloses for my study, in the form of a pamphlet, a presidential address on the subject delivered by him two or three years ago. With a few points in his letter I must deal, for they are as curious an instance of what schoolmen call the _ignoratio elenchi_ as I am likely to meet. 'The writer in the 'World,' he says, 'confesses himself in various passages to have been insane.' He suggests that I may possibly be 'merely a clever romance-writer;' but, deprecating my 'able onslaught on those medical men who have the dire misfortune to be engaged in lunacy practice,' adds that if my story is genuine I am 'bound to offer some suggestion as to the proper mode of treatment of the unfortunate victims of brain-disease;' and that as I have entered on a 'destructive course, I am in duty bound to finish by a constructive attempt.' Now for my answer. In the heading of this narrative, and throughout it, I deny distinctly, deliberately, categorically, that I have ever been insane; and I say that the fancies of delirium or hypochondria are as clearly to be distinguished from those of madness as midday from midnight, on a very little close observation, by every honest and unselfish mind. To send them to an asylum for treatment is the best way to turn them to insanity. I have been perfectly frank about my 'delusions,' for I remember them all, as had I been mad I should not. A man may doubt if he is in his mind or no; he cannot doubt whether or not he has been. The writer of the letter takes advantage of my having been in an asylum, as some of the friends who placed me there have done, to argue that I was mad. It is the favourite fallacy of the cart before the horse. It proves me to have been 'legally insane,' of course, and I give the phrase for what it is worth, with a contempt no words can measure. The doctors who made themselves the instruments of this wrong were two young village practitioners who never made any study of the matter, and one of them never saw me but five minutes in his life, when I was too ill in body to mark his face. Is this a state of law that should last? Is this a thing that should be let alone? Read some of Ruskin's 'Fors Clavigera,' gentlemen, and get rid of some of the selfishness which is the dry-rot of mankind, for which a placid acceptance of the wrongs of others is only another name. Scourge the money-changers from the temples, in the warrior-spirit of Him whose name we still bear. The very pamphlet before me speaks of nothing so much as of the special knowledge required in dealing with insanity; yet any two apothecaries may make a man mad in law. Let the very possibility of it be abolished. There is the first part