causes, its premonitory symptoms, its occasional sudden accession, its remissions and intermissions, its various phases of depression, excitement, or violence, its different symptoms and its probable termination? Only by careful observation of the disease can its real character be known, and its symptoms be rightly interpreted: from this firm base Medicine should refuse to be moved.
It is said sometimes, however, in vindication of the law, that it does not and cannot attempt to apportion exactly the individual responsibility, but that it looks to the great interests of society, and inflicts punishment in order to deter others from crime. The well-known writer, W. R. G., in a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette, has recently given forcible expression to this principle, and maintains that, if men would get a firm grasp of it, the conflicts which now occur would cease. He quotes with approbation the saying of the judge who, in sentencing a prisoner to death for sheep-stealing, said: "I do not sentence you to be hanged for stealing sheep, but I sentence you to be hanged in order that sheep may not be stolen." Here we see how entirely the writer has failed to grasp the real nature of insanity as a disease, for which the sufferer is not responsible, and which renders him irresponsible for what he does. "Were one-half the lunatic population of the country hanged, the spectacle would have no effect upon the insane person who cannot help doing what he does. If a boy in school were wilfully to pull faces and make strange antics, the master might justly punish him, and the punishment would probably deter other boys from following his example, but it would have no deterrent effect upon the unfortunate boy whose grimaces and antics were produced against his will by chorea. The one is a proper object of punishment; the other is a sad object of compassion, whom it would be a barbarous and cruel thing to punish. To execute a madman is no punishment to him, and no warning to other madmen, but a punishment to those who see in it, to use the words of Sir E. Coke, "a miserable spectacle, both against law, and of extreme inhumanity and cruelty, and which can be no example to others."
Moreover, it is not necessary to hang a lunatic in order to protect society, or in order to punish him, for it can protect itself sufficiently well by shutting him up in an asylum; and the prospect of being confined in a lunatic asylum is not one which is likely to encourage a man to do a murder; on the contrary, it is one which excites as much horror and antipathy in the minds of both sane and insane persons as can well be imagined.
And, finally, as the law did not prevent sheep-stealing by hanging sheep-stealers, but brought itself into discredit by offending the moral sense of mankind; so, likewise, it will not, by hanging madmen, prevent insane persons from doing murder, but must inevitably bring itself into contempt by offending the moral sense of mankind. Is not this result happening now? Has Mr. Baron Martin added any thing
