"INSANITY AND RESPONSIBILITY."
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.']
Stn,—The question so ably treated in your article of the 31st of July, headed "Insanity and Responsibility," would, I think, be greatly simplified were it competent to any individual to lay before a magistrate any cause he may have for doubting a neigh- bour's sanity, and were the magistrate required after such infor- mation to proceed according to the "Suggestions towards an Improved Lunacy System," a copy of which I enclose. The in- troduction of fixed periodical lunacy assizes is recommended, or else trial of lunacy cases at the ordinary assizes, after which it is suggested,—" 5. That every alleged lunatic appears at the said assizes or trial next after his incarceration or his being alleged a lunatic. If unfit so to appear, that he be visited and reported on to the Court by a person specially appointed by the Court for that purpose. 6. Every person alleged to be a dangerous lunatic or a fit person to be restrained in his liberty, to be visited by or brought before a magistrate, who at his discretion may provi- sionally commit him to a hospital or other fit place of treatment and detention until the next assizes, but no untried patient to be brought into contact with tried and confirmed lunatics." It is quite certain that the adoption of some such system as is here in- dicated, while effectually preventing such unjust and even unstatu- tory incarcerations as now continually occur, would also protect the public from the horrible crimes no less frequently perpetrated by unrecognised lunatics. Nothing can be more absurd and anomalous than the present system. Before a man's sanity can be inquired into by a legal tribunal, he must be certified a lunatic by a medical one, and the matter is still further complicated by re- quiring the certifier to see facts indicating insanity. The main result of this provision is deterioration of the certifier's conscience where it does not prevent his certifying at all, even in a case of whose genuineness he is convinced. Of course the more thoroughly conscientious is the doctor, the more unwilling is he to evade the legal provisions, by recording as "facts indicating insanity observed by myself" trifling incidents which indicate nothing of the kind. Thus do numberless lunatics remain at large, to their own great detriment and that of the public, who would have been placed under proper care, could their mental condition have been decided before the commission of crime, on the same sort of evidence that is admitted in proof of irresponsi- bility after it. Of course no such powers could be entrusted to doctors or any secret tribunal, but then, it has been superabund- antly proved that neither doctors nor secret tribunals can be safely trusted with the protection of the sane or of the public from the insane. One of the most justly noted alienis' sts of the day openly asserts that "no one is sane," that all crime is the result of disease. So it may be, but none the less shall we do well to frame our practice in these matters on the opinion given by the Earl of Shaftesbury before the Select Committee of 1859, that "any sensible layman conversant with the world and with man- kind can give a better opinion" as to a man's power of self- government "than all the medical men put together." A good means of obviating the danger you point out, that "non-profes- sional or exceptional criminals" maycount on impunity through the very greatness or eccentricity of their crime, would be to familiarise the public mind with the details of criminal asylum life. These, as given by the Lunacy Commissioners in their Report of Broad. moor for 1874, include solitary confinement in darkened rooms, without other change than two hours' solitary exercise daily in a walled court, and other treatment engendering in the patient's mind, as the Commissioners carefully inform us, the fiercest feel- ings of hatred and revenge. Add to this that criminal lunatics are or may be, in common with the alleged insane of all degrees, at the mercy of their keepers in the matter of corporal punish- ment, and liable to be kicked, stamped upon, throttled, and otherwise maltreated, even to death, on the smallest provocation —as happened lately to John Coates in Durham, and to another patient at Prestwich—and a man must be mad indeed if the pro- spect of Broadmoor "during Her Majesty's pleasure "is not almost as deterrent as the gallows.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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