JURIES, JUDGES, AND INSANITY. 443 



causes, its premonitory symptoms, its occasional sudden accession, its 

 remissions and intermissions, its various phases of depression, excite- 

 ment, 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 responsi- 

 bility, 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 sen- 

 tence 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 popu- 

 lation 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 pro- 

 duced against his will by chorea. The one is a proper object of pun- 

 ishment ; 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 punish- 

 ment to those who see in it, to use the words of Sir E. Coke, " a miser- 

 able 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 con- 

 fined 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, pre- 

 vent 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 



