True, some of the patients went altogether blind the moment they were interfered with, and had to be conveyed to the blind asylum--in accordance with the custom of the country--to be kept there for the rest of their lives at the public expense. Some even developed real diseases of the limbs, in consequence of their unaccustomed efforts to take violent exercise. But these occasional failures by no means daunted the resolution of philanthropic legislators. How could there be such a thing as disease of the eyes while their own eyes were strong? With blindness they were unhappily too well acquainted, even though they had never been blind themselves; for when a man could not see at all, the fact could readily be ascertained. But it was evident that so long as a man could see, he was not blind, and therefore to treat him for loss of sight would be absurd. The larger number of those for whom work and sunlight were prescribed neither lost their sight completely nor recovered it sufficiently to perform their allotted tasks in even the most perfunctory manner. The existence led by these unhappy people was miserable in the extreme. Every effort to use the eyes was painful. The glare of the sunlight was a torture baffling description. And their sufferings were not physical only. Their fellow-men, including their nearest and dearest friends, did their utmost to convince them of the illusory nature of their disease, and continually implored them to exert their wills to overcome temptations to imposture. By the more unfeeling, sneers and reproaches were not spared. In sheer despair the less courageous of these unfortunates died by their own hand. Oddly enough, those who were the most uncompromising in their discouragement of supposed impostors had themselves recently become painfully conscious of impairment of vision. Fear of discovery made them loud in denouncing others; ignorance of the nature of the malady gave them hope that work and sunlight might conduce to their own cure. In time, there were in that eccentric community an abundance of deceivers of two different orders: the first pretending an illness other than that which afflicted them; the second pretending to be well when they were ill. It is said that the second class was larger than the first, and that recruits were continually swelling its ranks. Altogether, in spite of the well-intentioned efforts of the investigators, the state of that tribe with regard to eye-disease was very much worse than it had been while the regulations of the second meeting were in force.