Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 10.djvu/195

 GUITEAU'S 0A8B. 183 �of diffieulty. And difficnltiea of this kind you might find very per- plexing, if you were compelled to determine the question of iusanity generally, without any rule for your guidance. �But the only safe rule for you is to direct your reflectionsto the one question which is the test of criminal responsibility, and whieh bas been so of ten repeated to you, viz., whether, wbatever may have been the prisoner's aingularities and eccentricities, he possessed the men- tal capacity, at the time the act was committed, to know that it was wrong, or was deprived of that capacity by mental disease. �In all th is matter there is one important distinction that you must not lose sigbt of, and you are to decide how far it is applicable to this case. It is the distinction between mental and moral obliquity ; be- tween a mental incapacity to understand the distinctions between right and wrong, and a moral indifference and insensibility to those dis- tinctions. The latter results from a blunted conscience, a torpid moral sense or depravity of heart ; and sometimes we are not inapt to mistake it for evidence of something wrong in the mental constir tution. We have probably all known men of more than the average of mental endowments, wbose whole lives have been marked by a kind of moral obliquity and apparent absence of the moral sense. We have known others who have first yielded to temptation with pangs of remorse, but each transgression became easier, until dishonesty be- came a confirmed habit, and at length all setisitiveness of conscience disappeared. �When we see men of seeming intelligence and of better anteced- ents reduced to this condition, we are prone to wonder whether the balance-wheels of the intellect are not thrown ont of gear, Bu^ in- difference to what is right is not ignorance of it, and depravity is not insanity, and we must be caretul not to mistake moral perversion for mental disease. �Whether it is true or not that insanity is a disease of the physical organ, the brain, it is clearly in one sense a disease, when it attacks a man in bis maturity. It involves a departure from bis normal and natural condition. And this is the reason why an inquiry into the man's previous condition is so pertinent, because it tends to show whether what is called an act of insanity is the natural outgrcwth of liis disposition or is utterly at war with it, and therefore indicates an unnatural change. �A man who is represented as having been always an affectionate parent and husband, suddenly kills wife and child. This is something so unnatural for such a man that a suspicion of his insanity arises at ��� �