Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/477

Rh and its consequences are based on delusions, either concealed or openly confessed. The action of alcohol seems to suspend some governing center, and capacity to discriminate the folly of the act. The mind appears to be eclipsed, and previous standards of truth and honor are overshadowed. All the former vigor remains, or appears to be intact; judgment and reason display vigor and clearness in criminal acts and conduct. Motives and purposes of life have changed, although the form and semblance of the past conduct remain.

Innumerable illustrations are seen among petty criminals, so called, where the acts have preceded the drink craze, and always been executed while the victim was using spirits in small quantities. Premeditation, acute reasoning, and apparent consciousness of acts and their consequences, preceding a drink excess, either associated with a moderate use of spirits or immediately before spirits are used in excess, should always be regarded as symptoms of mental derangement.

The use of spirits for the purpose of committing crime is another disputed question in courts.

Crimes which are supposed to have been committed by persons who deliberately used spirits for this special purpose are commonly found to have been stimulated and provoked by other causes. To give spirits to a person and encourage him to commit crime may not be an unusual occurrence, but its consummation is an accident and exceedingly uncertain. On general principles the natural tendency of an inebriate's mind is to ignore all restraint and obligation, legal, social, and moral. The higher governing centers are depressed and more or less paralyzed. The senses are deranged, and false impressions are constantly received, and the power of analysis and reason is diminished and broken up. All higher relations of duty are obscured, and only the lowest, most transient impulses control the mind. At this time temptations to acts that are criminal, urged on the bewildered mind, may be acted upon, from simple incapacity to reason and understand the consequences. This blurred mental state is of short duration, and merges quickly into anæsthetic physical and mental states, or delusional conceptions, of which fear and suspicion are prominent. The use of spirits to give courage to commit crime very often produces the opposite effect, particularly where an interval occurs between the use of spirits and the performance of the act.

The courage or stimulation of the first stage from the action of alcohol on the brain is of short, uncertain duration, and liable any moment to change to abject fear or other states.

There are two conditions in which crime is committed by persons who drink spirits for this purpose: one, where they become