"You had better go with him," he whispered gently. "It's best to avoid a scene. It won't be for long. Leave it to me. We'll soon get you out again. I'll see Ricaby at once, and to-morrow we'll swear out a habeas corpus. You'd better go quietly with him."
With an unobserved pressure of the hand, which he felt was returned, Tod silently said good-by. Paula slowly descended from the automobile. Turning to Mr. Cooley, she said, in a deliberate, dignified manner:
"Very well, Mr. Cooley, I am ready to accompany you."
CHAPTER XVII.
Among the unspeakable crimes which man, in the name of humanity, has perpetrated against his fellow man, none has been more gruesome, more merciless, more fiendishly cruel than the abuse of the private sanitarium.
There is a hazy notion in the public mind that the private insane asylum, the horrors of which were so vividly depicted by Charles Reade, Edgar Allan Poe, and other writers, are things of the barbarous past, and that in our own enlightened, humane, practical twentieth century, when the liberty of the individual was never so jealously safe-guarded, it would be impossible for any unscrupulous person, actuated by interested motives of his own, to "railroad" a perfectly sane relative to an institution, and retain him there indefinitely against his or her will. The startling truth, however, is that, under our present lunacy system, nothing is easier.
The infamous madhouses of half a century ago, with their secret dungeons, their living skeletons rattling in chains, their brutal keepers who tickled the soles of hapless inmates' feet to drive them into hysterics in anticipation of the annual perfunctory visit of the State examiners in lunacy, have, it is true been driven out of business; the existing sanitariums are now more or less under rigid State control, yet this official supervision is not always adequate protection against misrepresentation and fraud. By the free expenditure of money and with the coöperation of unscrupulous physicians, foul wrongs are frequently inflicted on the most innocent and unoffensive people. At the present moment it is not only possible for scheming persons, interested in getting a relative safely out of the way, to accomplish their sinister purpose, but each year in the United States dozens of perfectly sane persons are actually incarcerated in private asylums scattered over the country.
The medical superintendent of a prominent State hospital, in a paper read recently before the Bar Association practically admitted the truth of this. At the same time, reviewing the laws bearing upon the commitment and discharge of the criminally insane, he proposed certain changes suggested by the actual operation of the present laws. He also drew attention to a statement made by the Medical Record to the effect that, only a short time since, no fewer than fourteen persons were committed to one small institution by juries in a single year and every one of them was found later to be sane, and had to be discharged. The superintendent very properly insisted that there should be some modification of the present law whereby lunatics, accused of serious crimes against the person and especially those committing murder, should be dealt with by a tribunal having fixed, continuous responsibility, and that a jury of laymen should not be allowed to decide regarding the mental condition of any person with a view to his commitment to an asylum for the insane or to his discharge therefrom.
The abuses possible under the present loose system are only too obvious, the opportunity offered to fraud and crime only too apparent. Putting troublesome relatives in lunatic asylums might be considered an easy way of getting rid of them by those who are too tender-hearted or too cowardly to murder them outright. It is scarcely more merciful. Frequently the request for incarceration is not brought before a court or jury at all. A commission of insanity experts is summoned by the alleged lunatic's relatives, and if they are satisfied that the patient is of unsound mind they sign a paper committing him or her to some institution. Sometimes the signature of one physician only is sufficient, and in fraudulent cases, where the persons calling in the physicians are keenly interested in the result, everything is done to make out a bona-fide case, and prove the patient out of his or her mind. Harried, nervous, fearful of everybody and everything, the slightest lapse from control or commonplace speech is used for the patient's undoing.