Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 09.pdf/478

 CJiapters in the English Law of Lunacy. eighteenth century asylum system, when "darkness and solitude . . . the dismal cell, the bed of straw, the iron chain, and the inhuman scourge were the fearful lot of those who were best entitled to human pity and to human sympathy as being the victims of the most dreadful of all mortal calami ties." The then recognized tests of .responsi bility in mental disease were the product of that age of ignorance, folly and crime. Hav ing administered this deadly blow to the "wild beast" theory and the " general right and wrong " theory and, having once more driven home into the minds of his audience the conviction that science was far in ad vance of law as regards the nature of mental disease, Cockburn went on to analyze Erskine's, or as he said, " Lord Erskine's," defense of Hadfield, treating it as if it were a charge or a judgment instead of a forensic oration, and put forward with consummate skill the two main points on which he relied. Insanity and delusion were inseparable, and partial insanity both might and did exist, and ought, where it existed, to entail irresponsi bility as a consequence. " By anyone of the legion of casualties by which the material organization may be affected, any one or all of the various faculties of mind maybe dis ordered — the perception, the judgment, the reason, the sentiments, the affections, the propensities, the passions — and the mistake, existing in ancient times which the light of modern science has dispelled, lay in supposing that in order that a man should be mad it was necessary that he should exhibit those symptoms which would amount to total prostration of the intellect; whereas modern science has incontrovertibly established that anyone of these intellectual and moral func tions of the mind may be subject to separate disease and thereby man may be rendered the victim of the most fearful delusions, the slave of uncontrollable impulses impelling or rather compelling him to the commis sion " of crime. Cockburn fortified his position by the

439

authority of Dr. Ray. If sound, it was clearly an answer to the case for the Crown. McNaghten might well be rational in the ordinary affairs of life and yet the victim of partial delusion. The act was motiveless. It was committed in broad daylight and there was no effort at escape. Cockburn closed his speech with effective quietness. "Gentlemen, the life of the prisoner is in your hands; it is for you to say whether you will visit one, on whom God has been pleased to bring the heaviest of all human calamities, the most painful, the most appall ing of all mortal ills, with the consequences of an act which most undoubtedly but for this calamity never would have been сопь mitted." The result could not be doubtful. After hearing the evidence for the defense, ChiefJustice Tindal stopped the case and the prisoner was justly, but illegally, acquitted on the ground of insanity. This verdict provoked a remarkable outburst of public feeling, and the "general right and wrong theory" died hard. One member of Parlia ment, Sir Valentine Blake, moved for leave to bring in a bill abolishing the plea of insanity in cases of murder, except where the accused was known and reputed to be a maniac and not afflicted with partial insanity only, and that the standing orders of the House should be suspended till the bill was passed! But the gallant member found no contemporary legislator hardy enough to second his motion, and this piece of inchoate legislation was happily strangled at its birth. In spite of this exhibition of good sense, however, the crusade against the doctrine of partial insanity was carried briskly on. Sir Nicholas Tindal was generally condemned for having stopped the prosecution of McNaghten. Even the sober Scottish judg ment of Lord Campbell was disturbed. At length the House of Lords submitted to the common law judges a series of questions relating to the criminal responsibility of the insane. The answers of the judges — known