of the reform which the writer wants me to suggest, for which in my first chapter I warned him and all others that they have no right to ask me. I am neither Home Secretary, Commissioner, next friend, nor medical man; and it is no answer for the author of a book to say to his critic, 'Come up and write a better.' '_Ne sutor ultra crepidam_,' quotes the writer in his pamphlet; and it is true of me as of him. It is only my clear duty to set down, in words that shall burn, if God will send them to me, the breathing thoughts that spring, too deep for tears, out of my terrible personal experience. For this is no romance, but a commonplace reality. I have said with whom the responsibility for the reform lies: with the Home Secretary and Commissioners, and with the leading men in law and medicine who allow these things to be. When Sydney Smith said that nothing could be done with a corporate body of men, because they have neither a 'soul to be damned nor a body to be kicked,' he may not have been as right in the first clause as in the last. Souls may one day prove as divisible as the electric light; and before the Court beyond, to which I, and others who have suffered like me, from our very heart of hearts appeal, it will be of no use to plead a limited liability. I will go on with my suggestions of reform, though I am not bound to do so, for I believe the key to be simple. The lunacy laws are made in the supposed interests of relatives, not the sufferers themselves; and all is done to 'hush up,' not to expose. Why? There is nothing to be ashamed of in insanity; but in their utter selfishness friends shrink from the supposed consequences to themselves if the thing is 'talked about.' As if it could ever be anything else! The birds of the air will carry the matter; and all that these people gain by it is to have the increasing sect of the 'Head-shakers,' as a friend of mine has pleasantly christened them, tongue-wagging more and more behind their backs, and saying, 'Ah, poor people! madness in the family, you know.' And it serves them very justly right. I know these same Head-shakers well, and know well enough that they will never allow me to escape from the consequences of the past, such as they are. 'There was something in it, you know; he was very queer. _Pas de fumée sans feu_.' Proverbs are either the greatest lies or the greatest truths; and in 'society' certainly this is one of the first sort. I was caught in the act of laughing at a play of my own only the other day, and I hear that a head-shaker spoke of it at the Mutton-chops Club afterwards as a melancholy sign of my mental condition. They congregate much at some latter-day clubs, the members of this sect; and, in the absence of natural material in that way, they tell each other what to think, and then go home and think it. Applied to literary work, the result sometimes comes forth as 'criticism.'