Excerpt from Folder for Scorpio
The writer - some twenty years ago - had a an experience similar to that of the hero of Charles Reade"s novel "Very Hard Cash" - which novel led to a reform of the treatment of persons confined in Insane Asylums throughout Great Britain.
Not being a lawyer, the gifted author of "Very Hard Cash" was not equipped to pierce the sophistry and fraud which has gradually crept into English legislation with the growth of Private Insane Asylums, and the increase of that section of the Medical Profession which makes a specialty of running sane men and women into Private Madhouses for life, on a perjured charge of insanity, for a handsome consideration - a heavy fee.
The writer - being a law-writer by profession, and author of "The Lunacy Law of the World" - a law book of some four hundred pages - treating of the Lunacy Laws of Great Britain, France, Italy, Russia, Germany, Austro-Hungary and the United States - the author - in order to write "Chaloner on Lunacy, or The Lunacy Law of the World," aforesaid, was forced to penetrate the fuliginous regions of Parliamentary enactments of the past seventy-five or a hundred years - the period in which the healthy and sound English laws concerning Lunacy were surreptitiously undermined by interested parties, i. e. proprietors of Private Madhouses, Lunacy Quacks, and that branch of the Legal Profession sufficiently debauched to aid and abet their villainies - and in their stead, the infamous travesties of justice now in force in England raised their poisonous heads, and deprived a sane man or woman of notice in a proceeding against his or her sanity, as well as of opportunity to appear and defend himself or herself against the charge which would imprison him or her in a living Hell - a Madhouse cell - for life.
The situation is equally damnable the world over.
A glance at the critiques by the Law Reviews of "Chaloner On Lunacy" will show how wide-spread is the evil.
Reform is notoriously slow. The greater the abuse - the more deeply riveted in wealth and power and prestige - the mightier will be the resistance. Therefore, it should surprise no intelligent reader to hear that the writer is now in his twenty-second year of legal warfare to repossess himself of his property rights in New York State - he having been illegally declared insane there on March 10th, 1897, after having been corruptly lured there from his home at "The Merry Mills", Cobham, Virginia, on February 13th, 1897, by his false friend, the late Stanford White, acting in collusion with his - the writer"s - long estranged, and hostile brothers and sisters, who, although each a millionaire in his or her own right, nevertheless coveted the million or two - by recent legacies it now amounts to two million dollars - of the writer.
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