"3. Of fathers and mothers who kill their children under the pressure of domestic anxiety culminating in an insane dread of starvation, it may be observed that they are generally remarkable for domestic virtue and devoted attachment to their victims, and that between them and ordinary murderers there is no single point of resemblance.

"4. Discontent, transformed into an insane belief in persecution, presents greater difficulties. The case is generally put in a form which seems to preclude a satisfactory answer. A maniac thinks he has been injured by another and kills him. If the injury were real, a sane murderer would be responsible, and so, it is contended, ought the madman to be. This curiously illog ical argument ignores the simple fact that the two cases have nothing in common but the act itself. The imaginary offense has imaginary accompaniments, and every thought connected with it is one of confusion. To suppose that a mind which can imagine an impossible offense is sound in all other respects, is to outrage common sense, and set at nought the experience of all who have knowledge of the insane; for with one consent

they repudiate the notion of a mind subject to such a delusion as being sound, and free to act as it will, beyond the sphere of its influence. The more closely the victim of this painful delusion is observed, the more extensive is found to be the disorder of his intellect. Those acts which are not directly prompted by his delusion are more strange, and his passions more excitable than those of other men. The theory of a single insane idea, springing up in a mind otherwise sound, having no effect on the remaining faculties, and simply prompting an action which, once suggested, is carried out with the same complete consciousness of its real nature as exists in the mind of the sane man acting under the suggestion of a corresponding reality, is too absurd to be for a moment entertained. Even in this case, then, the question of responsibility cannot be decided by the simple test of a knowledge of right and wrong. But there is another

case allied to the one now under consideration which presents still greater difficulties. A man receives a real injury, and avenges himself; but it is alleged that he was not of sound mind when he committed the act. The unsoundness of his

that

mind is admitted, but he is deemed responsible because his act was instigated by the common motive of revenge. The obvious answer is, the real injury has been by his insane mind magnified to undue importance, and then acted upon just as if it had been altogether imaginary; and that he is therefore neither more nor less responsible for his act than the man whose motive was from the very first in the nature of a delusion. In this case, too, an inquiry into the state of mind, extending much beyond the legal test, will be necessary, and cannot be refused; and this once granted, must result in showing the insuf ficiency of the test. Even in those cases where the criminal act cannot be traced to any delusion of which it is the legitimate offspring, but it is simply alleged in defense that the party is of unsound mind, the very fact of the unsoundness becomes an irresistible plea in mitigation. It would be strange indeed if the case of the maniac under the accusation of crime is the only one in which such a plea is ignored and refused. We cannot, therefore, too strongly condemn the credulity which credits a mind already occupied by delusions with an otherwise efficient state of

faculties; and we contend that it is in the highest degree improbable that a mind so possessed can, beyond the sphere of its delusions, think, feel and act with clearness, force and freedom from the same.

แ

Some writers, under a strong sense of the failure of the legal test of knowledge of right and wrong, have sought to set up in its place the power of control or restraint. The test has been thus transferred from the intellect to the will – from the knowledge of right to the power of acting aright. But this is a mere shifting of the difficulty; for it is obviously not more easy to measure the exact amount of a man's selfrestraint than to gauge his abstract knowledge of right and wrong, lawful and unlawful: " Guy & Fer. Forensic Med. (5th ed.) 121-124. See also Quain's Dic. of Med. (Am. ed.), sub. Insanity, topics Impulsive Insanity, Moral Insanity, pp. 725, 727.

We have copied the able and philosophical views of these authors to show the inaccuracy of the test of criminal responsibility laid down by the fifteen learned English judges in response to the questions propounded by the English Lords.

§ 53. Test of capacity required for criminal responsibility.

It is perhaps difficult to furnish any absolute test in such cases; but it may be said that in order to make a person responsible for his acts as criminal, he must possess enough intelligence and capacity to have a criminal intent and purpose: See Criminal Law, vol. 2, Field's L. B., § 272; Com. v. Mosler, 4 Pa. St. 261; Com. v. Rogers, 7 Met. (Mass.) 500; Sanchez v. People, 22 N. Y. 147; Freeman v. People, 4 Denio, 9; Bovard v. State, 30 Miss. 600; State v. Neeley, 20 Ia. 199; Pond v. People, 8 Mich. 150; Willis v. People, 32 N. Y. 715. Perhaps the opinion of the court in Bovard v. State contains as clear an exposition of the modern doctrine on this subject as can be found in the adjudications in this country. It was observed in this case that "in order to constitute a crime a person must have intelligence and capacity enough to have a criminal intent and purpose. If his reason and mental powers are either so deficient that he has no will, no conscience or controlling mental power; or if, through the overwhelming power of mental disease, his intellectual power is for the time obliterated, he is not a responsible moral agent, and is not pun