Among the laity, before the war, the justification of an attitude of inertia towards the treatment of mental disorder (more particularly of the psychoneuroses) was often based upon two statements. The first was that many of the phenomena reported were not real, but were the imaginings of hysterical women. If to this it was objected that men were not immune to hysteria[65] one was met by the retort: “But they are ‘neuropaths.’” This war has, however, removed from honest people’s minds the possibility of regarding these phenomena in such a shamelessly unscientific light. In the military hospitals there have been hundreds of patients suffering from psychoneuroses, who are demonstrably neither women nor neuropaths, in any of the legitimate senses of these terms. And many of these men have suffered intensely. Their fears and other emotional troubles are such as they usually conceal as long as possible, until further endurance is intolerable. Their troubles are real enough to them. “But they are unreasonable,” the healthy philistine may object. Some (by no means all) of the fears _are_ unreasonable, if by that is meant that the actual danger (as the healthy man estimates it) and the emotion which it evokes in the patient are entirely disproportionate. But who among us has “sized up” life’s dangers so accurately that he can say he knows the precise degree of fear which each one _ought_ to evoke? In some country places the inhabitants to-day are more afraid of the presence in their houses of peacock’s feathers or of hawthorn blossom than of scarlet fever. Their fears are unreasonable. But we do not call these people neurasthenics. As a matter of fact, neurasthenia is one of the last diseases likely to attack these rustics. If they vouchsafe any reason for their fear, it is safe to assert that it will be a rationalisation, for its real sources are hidden from them. And if we really wish to discover the cause of their fear we turn for help to the records of folk-lore and ethnology. In other words, we investigate the history of the fear. This history may go back many centuries and the process of recovering it from a series of clues will prove a task of infinite fascination. Now the history of the neurasthenic’s fear is likewise obtainable and much more easily, for it is of much more recent date. Its discovery often means the freeing of a mind from torment, the restoration of a useful member to society, and the enrichment of the science whereby other similar liberations may become possible. But how few investigators, as yet, have been attracted by this tremendous unfilled field of knowledge! However, our philistine, while agreeing to this, may, and often does, change his ground. He may add: “When I said that the phenomena were not real I had in mind rather the pains and the paralyses from which the hysteric and neurasthenic suffer—or say they suffer.” To this we may answer in the words of Dr. Purves Stewart:—