I have said much about the obligation of the sane in reference to easing the burdens of those committed to institutions.  I might say almost as much about the attitude of the public toward those who survive such a period of exile, restored, but branded with a suspicion which only time can efface.  Though a former patient receives personal consideration, he finds it difficult to obtain employment.  No fair-minded man can find fault with this condition of affairs, for an inherent dread of insanity leads to distrust of one who has had a mental breakdown.  Nevertheless, the attitude is mistaken.  Perhaps one reason for this lack of confidence is to be found in the lack of confidence which a former patient often feels in himself.  Confidence begets confidence, and those men and women who survive mental illness should attack their problem as though their absence had been occasioned by any one of the many circumstances which may interrupt the career of a person whose mind has never been other than sound.  I can testify to the efficacy of this course, for it is the one I pursued.  And I think that I have thus far met with as great a degree of success as I might have reasonably expected had my career never been all but fatally interrupted.

Discharged from the State Hospital in September, 1903, late in October of that same year I went to New York.  Primarily my purpose was to study art.  I even went so far as to gather information regarding the several schools; and had not my artistic ambition taken wing, I might have worked for recognition in a field where so many strive in vain.  But my business instinct, revivified by the commercially surcharged atmosphere of New York, soon gained sway, and within three months I had secured a position with the same firm for which I had worked when I first went to New York six years earlier.  It was by the merest chance that I made this most fortunate business connection.  By no stretch of my rather elastic imagination can I even now picture a situation that would, at one and the same time, have so perfectly afforded a means of livelihood, leisure in which to indulge my longing to write the story of my experiences, and an opportunity to further my humanitarian project.

Though persons discharged from mental hospitals are usually able to secure, without much difficulty, work as unskilled laborers, or positions where the responsibility is slight, it is often next to impossible for them to secure positions of trust.  During the negotiations which led to my employment, I was in no suppliant mood.  If anything, I was quite the reverse; and as I have since learned, I imposed terms with an assurance so sublime that any less degree of audacity might have put an end to the negotiations then and there.  But the man with whom I was dealing was not only broad-minded, he was sagacious.  He recognized immediately such an ability to take care of my own interests as argued an ability to protect those of his firm.  But