, till he has fully
recovered; but it does prevent them from even thinking of treating criminals
with that contemptuous tone which would seem to say, »I, if I were you, should
be a better man than you are,« a tone which is held quite reasonable in regard
to physical ailment. Hence, though they conceal ill health by every cunning and
hypocrisy and artifice which they can devise, they are quite open about the most
flagrant mental diseases, should they happen to exist, which to do the people
justice is not often. Indeed, there are some who are, so to speak, spiritual
valetudinarians, and who make themselves exceedingly ridiculous by their nervous
supposition that they are wicked, while they are very tolerable people all the
time. This however is exceptional; and on the whole they use much the same
reserve or unreserve about the state of their moral welfare as we do about our
health.
    Hence all the ordinary greetings among ourselves, such as, How do you do?
and the like, are considered signs of gross ill-breeding; nor do the politer
classes tolerate even such a common complimentary remark as telling a man that
he is looking well. They salute each other with, »I hope you are good this
morning;« or »I hope you have recovered from the snappishness from which you
were suffering when I last saw you;« and if the person saluted has not been
good, or is still snappish, he says so at once and is condoled with accordingly.
Indeed, the straighteners have gone so far as to give names from the
hypothetical language (as taught at the Colleges of Unreason) to all known forms
of mental indisposition, and to classify them according to a system of their
own, which, though I could not understand it, seemed to work well in practice;
for they are always able to tell a man what is the matter with him as soon as
they have heard his story, and their familiarity with the long names assures him
that they thoroughly understand his case.
    The reader will have no difficulty in believing that the laws regarding ill
health were frequently evaded by the help of recognized fictions, which every
one understood, but which it would be considered gross ill-breeding to even seem
to understand. Thus, a day or two after my arrival at the Nosnibors', one of the
many ladies who called on me made excuses for her husband's only sending his
card, on the ground that when going through the public marketplace that morning
he had stolen a pair of socks. I had already been warned that I should
