While courts of judicature are shewing a very laudable anxiety to protect the persons of the partially insane from unreasonable coercion, it is equally incumbent on these courts to protect the public from the consequences of that liberty of action which is thus secured to the partially insane. Their liabilities ought to be commensurate with their privileges.

CHAPTER XXI.

VISIT TO BETHLEM.

A VISIT to the criminal department of Bethlem Hospital is productive at present of strange and painful associations in regard to the administration of justice in this country. Hadfield, so justly saved by the eloquence and wisdom of Erskine, is no more. Dalmas, the Battersea Bridge murderer, is removed by transportation-a sentence which probably was well adapted to the extent of his guilt; for there had been a heavy injury to his head in his early life, which might fairly be taken in extenuation as to the motives of his act, though the measures afterwards adopted by him for concealment showed that he was still susceptible of motives, and, therefore, a responsible agent. The Greenwich murderess* is at present in Bethlem, where her case will afford very mischievous evidence to all such hysterical young females as may be cognizant of it, how comfortably life may to appearance be spent after the indulgence of splenetic cruelty, provided a

* I saw this young person twice; and I must do justice to the great improvement, which had in the interval been wrought in the moral state of her mind.

human being is destroyed. There is not about her the smallest evidence of insanity.

The honourable Mr. Tuchet, cool, indifferent, and self-possessed, enjoys there the immunity from punishment, which a well-chosen counsel can at any time obtain for an eccentric culprit, when the punishment of death is manifestly too severe for the occasion, and yet nothing but the plea of insanity can avert it. Oxford has the frequent gratification of being stared at as the man who shot at the Queen. Captain Johnson's cold, close, subacid visage, and quiet, gentle demeanour, is awfully contrasted in our recollection with the demoniacal violence which drink and fear, operating upon cruelty, could produce in him, without the smallest warranty of insanity. While Macnaughten, the murderer of Mr. Drummond, a man really under the influence of monomaniacal impulses, is, in these walls, as certainly prevented from outbreaks of violence by a consciousness that they would be followed by a period of seclusion, as he might, perhaps, before have been, had the laws of his country, or rather the principle on which those laws are carried out, furnished him with more definite reasons of self-control.

I am far from affirming that all these unhappy persons deserved death; I only mean to suggest, that for the sake of preventive example, they required some form of punishment.

To many of these criminal (so called) lunatics, the enduring confinement is in itself a dreadful punishment. But in these cases there is a sad expenditure of

unfruitful suffering; for the confinement being entirely and sedulously deprived of the character of a punishment, operates unpreventively. I waive at present the consideration of punishment as to its reformatory effects; though here it claims attention on behalf of the unfortunate delinquents themselves, in so far as they may be responsible agents in a religious point of view.

The question how far mental disease may be deemed to coexist in some cases with elements of character on which the fear of punishment may operate so as to prevent the insane disposition from leading to crime, is one of fearful importance. Until some distinction of this kind is made good, forensic subtilty, operating upon the sympathies of jurymen, will evermore find means of procuring a very dangerous immunity for acts which penal consequences would deter. This it will effect in various ways. It will, for instance, dispose us to accept ordinary and normal states of mind, when heightened and exaggerated by external circumstances, as indicative of derangement. Such was the mode in which Captain Johnson's case was brought to issue in a verdict of insanity. Again, forensic skill may misrepresent as insane those brutal persons who want, not the intellectual, but the moral sense; for their conduct will often be nearly as perverse as that which flows out of insanity itself. This confusion would most probably have saved the life of Lord Ferrars, if his trial had taken place in the present century. Or, thirdly, it may operate by extending the plea of insanity to the case of

persons confessedly insane, but not insane quoad the particular act which constitutes their delinquency. Such, in a contribution to the Medical Gazette, republished in this work, I presume to have been the case of Macnaughten. In his assumption of a conspiracy against him on the part of the members of the government, he was truly insane and irresponsible; but, this delusion granted, he might still be deemed capable of appreciating the fact, that to defeat a conspiracy by an act of assassination is quite contrary to the laws of this country. His insanity was real, but partial.

These suggestions, I repeat, by no means intend capital punishment as that species of infliction which the homicidal acts alluded to ought all to have incurred. Simple imprisonment, solitary confinement, transportation, as recently in the case of Dalmas, may each find a place in such a code, whatever subsequent detention may be required for the protection of the public when the penal period may have expired. A total change of country, attended by reformatory and curative habits, may work such a change in the constitution of mind as to fit the delinquent for ultimate enlargement. Many vistas will indeed be opened into character by an improved method of dealing with its diseases, which at present have no existence.

In the case of Captain Johnson, there seems to have been no evidence of insanity. With respect to that fearful state of abnormal conduct which results from unsoundness of the moral principle, I must refer to a former work for proof of its peculiar fitness for penal. infliction in its fullest extent. The theory of irrespon

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