The third meeting fully recognised many of the follies and absurdities of its predecessors. Powerful speakers and keen investigators argued with great force and clearness that the incapacity of the sufferers arose entirely from disuse of the limbs, and not from disease. By some of the speakers, this disuse was attributed--with a singular momentary forgetfulness of past decrees--to the wicked deceit of the idle, and of the friends who had solicited public charity in their behalf. The whole community--so these excellent, well-meaning members insisted--had been systematically gulled by the devices of impostors. There was nothing in the world the matter with the disabled weavers and those whom they had infected by their example. They must be forced to behave as if they were well, and well they would become. No doubt their eyes were weak. Whose eyes would not be weak after years of confinement within doors? Blazing sunlight and constant use of eyes and limbs would soon cure their fancies, and these infallible remedies must be prescribed for them at once. Such cogent common-sense arguments could not but meet with the approval they deserved to meet with in the minds of the common-sense people who heard them. The recommendations of the speakers were promptly adopted. And now ensued a very singular state of affairs. By command of the court, all invalids disabled by no visible and well-known disorder, were forced to rise from their couches, to drag themselves about in the blazing sunlight, and even to resume their former occupations. Some of them, however, succeeded in simulating well-known disorders of the limbs so cleverly, that they were considered, even by skilled investigators, to be victims of chronic disease, and were mercifully left alone. Others had already been partially cured by the complete rest from their labours they had long enjoyed, and though the rough treatment they received, and the trying effects of sudden exposure to light, caused them great discomfort, they now learnt for the first time that they had recovered the use of their eyes--long incarceration in dark rooms having prevented their discovering the fact sooner. This result, however satisfactory to themselves, was a source of infinite misery to their companions in affliction, for it was hastily assumed that a mode of procedure which had proved in the main efficacious with a few, must prove equally efficacious with all.