no THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



unsoundness appear. In most cases the victim is a neurotic by inher- 

 itance and growth. In other words, he was born with a defective brain 

 and organism, and both growth and culture have been imperfect. 

 Many and complex influences, among which alcohol or other narcotics 

 may be prominent, have prepared the soil, furnished the seed, and 

 stimulated the growth of a positive disease of the brain. The higher 

 brain-centers have slowly succumbed to a paralysis, as mysterious as 

 it is certain in its march. The victim's capacity to comprehend his 

 condition, and adjust himself to the surroundings, becomes less and 

 less, and he is more and more a waif drifting with every possible influ- 

 ence. In appearance, head, face, and body are angular and imperfectly 

 developed, the nutrition is defective, the eye, the voice, and every act 

 and movement indicate degeneration and disease. Any general history 

 of the crime reveals delirium, hallucinations, delusions, and maniacal 

 impulses. Thus, in one day, the papers recorded the following among 

 other cases of this class : An inebriate, of previously quiet disposition, 

 killed his wife, supposing she had put poison in his food. Another 

 man in a similar state shot a stranger Avho differed with him on the 

 age of Queen Victoria. Another man killed his father, who remon- 

 strated with him for overdriving a horse. Still another assaulted 

 fatally his brother, who would not give him money. Two men, both 

 intoxicated, mortally wounded each other in a quarrel who should 

 pay for the spirits drunk. Another man killed both wife and child, 

 supposing the former was going to desert him. Thus, day after day, 

 the records of these inebriate lunatics appear, and each case is as posi- 

 tively the act of a maniac as if committed by an inmate of an asylum, 

 whose insanity was long ago adjudged. In each case, a long premoni- 

 tory stage has preceded this last act ; the individual history of almost 

 every inebriate furnishes abundant evidence of this. In the court- 

 room this insanity of the prisoner is ignored, and the legal fiction, 

 that drunkenness is no excuse for crime, prevails. The prisoner is 

 assumed to be always a free agent, and the use of alcohol a willful 

 act, the consequences of which he should be held accountable for. As 

 a result, the victim is destroyed, and the object of the law, to reform 

 the offender and deter others from the commission of crime, lament- 

 ably fails. 



The second class of these inebriate maniacs are less prominent in 

 the press, but more often seen in the lower and police courts. They 

 are arrested for drunkenness, minor assaults, and all grades of breaches 

 of the peace. They use alcohol, opium, or any other drug for its effect, 

 and their character and conduct are a continuous history of insane and 

 imbecile acts. In appearance they are suffering from disease, and the 

 hereditary history is prominent in ancestral degenerations and defects. 

 They are repeaters for the same offense over and over again, and their 

 crime is of a low, imbecile type against both person and property, char- 

 acterized by profound mental and moral paralysis. In popular esti- 



