Ten Years and Ten Months in Lunatic Asylums in Different States

by Moses Swan

I have now already related two transactions wherein both the male and female attendants were engaged in brutal acts against poor lunatic persons, who should have had the sympathy of all and kind treatment by attendants.

By this time the reader sees that these wicked attendants are in league and go hand in hand in crimes of this kind.

The Devil is the father of the Cain family and the father of lies, and almost all of the attendants of lunatic asylums are graduates or pupils in that family, as near as I can judge by their works, "for by their works ye shall know them."

ALFRED STILL HOLDS THE REIN OF GOVERNMENT.

I will relate another transaction wherein I, M. Swan, was a great sufferer, and lest the reader may think me a trespasser, I will state it was not for what I had done, but for what I could not do.

Early one morning J. P. Bacon, Scott, Fitzgerald, Clingstain and others, six or eight in number, were brought in my room and seated on a bench in a line, then Alfred began to clip their hair one by one, giving them the State prison clip, so called. He then says to me, "sit down." I knew most of them to be wicked men, and to sit down with them and receive the mark, I could not, and disobeyed his command by saying, "I can't."

I believe the spirit is the moving cause or mainspring of the mind, and the mind is the man, or in other words, "that which suffers or enjoys."

Reader, can you rise from your seat until your mind is changed? Can a mistaken person change his or her ways till the mind is changed? Could the blind man whose eyes Jesus opened see until there was a cure wrought by the Divine Redeemer? Could Saul of Tarsus, desist in persecuting the church till his mind was changed, for he said he "verily thought he was doing God service?" And so like Paul I labored under the mistaken notion in my weakness, that I should be lost forever, yet I was a firm believer in the truth; I believed others could be saved. I was afraid to do anything wrong, and no person saw me smile during my captivity for more than ten years.

But to my story. I said, "I can't," when he told me to sit down to have my hair sheared. The attendant then removed all others from the room, locking me in. Presently he returned with patient Sears. Sears was a great, stout, robust-looking man, having in his hand two of the straps BB, buckled together with a noose made in the same. They both rushed toward me. I backed into the corner, and Sears tried to lasso me by throwing the noose or running-knot over my head. In the meantime, I raised my hands, warding off the noose. Sears being tired of this, then tried to persuade me to be bound, asking me to put on cuffs A, which I refused. He plead like the devil transformed into an angel of light, saying, "put them on, they won't hurt you," and then tried to encourage me by saying, he had had them on a hundred times. Oh, the devil let loose in the person of Sears and attendant Alfred.

This moment a boy came along near the window. Attendant raised the window and told him to send up a man from the other house to bind a man (meaning me), and the cowards left, and cowards they were, for the boy, not more than twelve years old, could have floored me at that time in a moment.