him responsible for the former. Therefore, it is held by law that when incapacitating disease is the result of long-continued, voluntary excesses, it would be impolitic to hold an individual thus affected as responsible for the acts which he might commit under the influence of this disease. It would, it seems to us, [252] be utterly absurd for the law to hold that a man was responsible for any act committed by him during a period of incapacity if that incapacity was produced by a voluntary act, however far the cause and the effect were dissociated as regards time. If such were the law, it would be impossible to make out real irresponsibility, for it would amount, in many cases, to an impossibility to determine the question as to whether any ordinary mental disease was caused by the acts of the individual or by the inexorable circumstances of an evironment in space and time which fate determines. We would go too far to endeavor to trace the fault of rendering oneself incapable to such a remote past, because it is only fair to hold a man responsible for consequences which an ordinary understanding could recognize as likely to follow from immediate acts. True, to the wise man evil must arise in time to come from any unvirtuons action in the present. But the laws were not framed with reference to wise men, but mostly with a careful regard to fools. So it would be anything but just to regard the volitional element in the inception of a series of events as giving a character of criminality to any subsequent act which happened to be against the law, for it is evident that the cerebral conditions may become in time an efficient cause of the act without the intervention of will, and even in spite of the very strongest motives which would lead in an ordinary individual to abstinence from the act in question. There are prejudices in men's flesh.

2372. Drunkenness Remote Cause of Insanity: Responsibility. This subject was ably treated by Story, J., in the case of Alexander Drew. "The question made at bar," he said, "is whether insanity, whose remote cause is habitual drunkenness, is or is not an excuse in a court of law for a homicide committed by a party while so insane, but not at

13 American Jurist, 7; 5 Mason, 28.

the time intoxicated or under the influence of liquor. We are clearly of opinion that insanity is a competent excuse in such a case. In general, insanity is an excuse for any crime, because the party has not the possession of his reason which includes responsibility. An exception is where the crime is committed when the party is in a fit of intoxication, and while it lasts; and not, as in this case, a remote consequence superinduced by the antecedent exhaustion of the party arising from gross and habitual drunkenness. However criminal in a moral point of view such an indulgence is, and however justly a party may be responsible for his acts arising from it to Almightly God, human tribunals are generally restricted from punishing them, since they are not the acts of a reasonable being. Had the crime been committed when Drew was in a fit of intoxication, he would have been liable to be convicted of murder. As he was not then intoxicated, but merely insane from an abstinence from liquor, he cannot be pronounced guilty of the offence. The law looks to the immediate and not to the remote cause, to the actual state of the party and not to the cause which remotely produced it. Many species of insanity arise remotely from what in a moral point of view is a criminal neglect or fault of the party; as from religious melancholy, undue exposure, extravagant pride, ambition, etc. Yet such insanity has always been deemed a sufficient excuse for any crime done under its influence." This, it cannot be doubted, is good law, although few opportunities of enunciating it have, as far as we know, occurred in England.' It has, however, been confirmed by other Judges in America. Thus, in the State v. Hundley,' while it was expressly laid down that "temporary insanity produced immediately by intoxication does not destroy responsibility for crimes, where the patient when sane and

1 Lord Hale has remarked (P. C., pt. i., ch. 4): "If by means of drunkenness an habitual or fixed madness be caused, that will be excuse, though it be contracted by the vice and will of the party, for this habitual or fixed frenzy puts a man in the same condition as if it were contracted at first involuntarily." And Holroyd, J., in Burroughs' Case, (1 Lewin C. C. 75) said: Drunkenness is not insanity, nor does it answer to what is termed an unsound mind, unless the derangement which it causes becomes fixed and continued by the drunkenness being habitual, and thereby rendering the party incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong."

46 Mo. 414.

responsible made himself voluntarily drunk." The Court further held that to be punishable, the crime must be the immediate result of the fit of intoxication and while it lasts, and not the result of insanity remotely occasioned by previous bad habits. In the latter case, it was held that insanity is entitled to the same consideration as when arising from any other cause.

2373. Responsibility of Persons laboring under Delirium Tremens.-It follows from what has been said above that the law regarding delirium tremens, as it must do, as a mental disease caused by the excessive use of intoxicating liquors, and as due to habitual excesses as distinguished from one voluntary debauch, cannot regard the individual thus affected as a responsible citizen, otherwise it would be unable to exempt any insane person from the severest penalties of the criminal law. We have seen that it is most difficult to discover the genesis of disease. "Was it this man or his father sinned, Lord, that he was born blind?" asked the Jews; and the difficulty they felt must be experienced by each person who endeavors to find the roots of unhealth in the mould of history. In many cases, if the truth were known, insanity other than delirium tremens is the direct result of long indulged habits of vice, and so long as the law deals with these upon the ordinary principles applicable to mental unsoundness, so long must it deal with individuals laboring under delirium tremens in the same way. And such is actually the policy and practice of the law, as will be evident from the many cases already adverted to.2

But in order to excuse a crime on this ground, it must have been committed during the actual insanity which characterizes it. Thus, on a trial for murder, the defence of insanity was set up, and it was attempted to prove it by showing a great amount of senseless extravagance and absurd eccentricity of conduct, coupled with habits of excessive intemperance, causing fits of delirium tremens. The prisoner, however, it was proved, was not laboring under the effects of such a fit at the time of the act, and the circumstances showed sense and deliberation, and a perfect understanding of the nature of the act. It was held that the evidence was not sufficient to support the defence, as it rather tended to show wilful excess and extreme folly than mental incapacity. Per Erle, C. J., Reg. v. Leigh, 4 F. & F. 915.

* See the case of Wylie, which was tried in Glasgow, 30th Sept., 1858, 3 Irvine, 218, where the accused committed murder during the delirium of this disease, and was found not guilty.

374. The Restraint of Drunkards.-Something, although not a great deal, must be said upon this important subject. It is well known that the English law refuses to interfere with the liberty of an individual on the ground of drunkenness, even although the intoxication may have become habitual and passed from vice into disease. The law of England has a superstitious respect for the liberty of the subject, and this respect has stood in the way of many most useful reforms. The great principle of State education, the principle that just as government does not allow men and women to starve, but supplies them with physical sustenance, so ought the law to make mental pauperism impossible, by the supply of mental training, was opposed on the ground that if government did so interfere, it would be unwarrantable meddling with the liberty of the subject. So in sanitary reform. The contagious disease acts have been and are vigorously opposed upon the same ground, and disease is allowed to reign supreme over the health, the liberty, and the lives of thousands, all because of this obsolete theory. And so, out of respect to this same theory, an individual is allowed to deprive himself of all liberty, to place himself in a position in which there are numberless temptations to crime, and no adequate protection for those who may commit criminal acts, to cultivate disease in himself and others that may come after him, and to sow the seeds which will grow up either in crime or insanity in the next generation. Still England will not interfere. Many of the United States have taken what seems to us a rational course in this matter, and deal with habitual drunkards in a way which is beneficial to themselves, their friends and relatives and the State. [258] Belgium and Sweden have passed measures for the restraint of habitual drunkards. The Province of Quebec has recently passed an excellent "act for the interdiction and cure of habitual drunkards;" and the necessity of restrictive measures has been

Sce evidence of American witnesses examined before the Habitual Drunkards' Committee.

2

* Assembly Bill, No. 24 (1870.) The use of the Canadian bill, which provides for the interdiction and cure of habitual drunkards, will be found in full in Dr. Lauder Lindsay's paper. The first clause provides that "on petition, under oath, presented to any one of the Judges of the Superior Court of Lower Canada (who alone shall have the power to act) by any relations, whether of blood or by affinity, or, in default

felt both in Australia and New Zealand.' And still England will not interfere. It is calculated that there are about 60,000 lunatics in England and Scotland, and that there are not less thon 600,000 habitual drunkards. And it is believed, upon such evidence as can be procured, that not less than 50,000 or 60,000 lives are lost annually in England through accidents and diseases caused by the abuse of intoxicating liquors; and yet Englond will not tie the hands of those suicides because alcohol is a slow poison. The liberty of the subject is allowed to render persons, in the words of the Canadian bill mentioned above, "of grievous injury as well to their relations as to their creditors:" it is allowed to stand in the way of the reclamation by a "reasonable and regular course of [259 treatment of many who might be made useful citizens of a State, which is exhausted with the weight of its burden of disease and crime." The late Dr. Donald Dalrymple labored earnestly and untiringly to secure some legislation upon the point in this country, but although a select committee sat and inquired into the whole subject, listened to the evidence of many medical men who were well suited to give a valuable opinion on the subject, of the governors of prisons, magistrates, coroners, barristers, and others, and although almost every witness called before the committee expressed an opinion in favor of some restrictive measures, and although the committee reported in favor of such legislation, nothing has as yet been done, and the death of Dr. Dalrymple is likely to be another retarding circumstance in the course of legislation, which, although delayed, is nevertheless inevitable. One thing is certain, and that is, that long-continued habits of intemperance, even when they do not induce

of relations, by any friend, of any habitual drunkard, setting forth that by reason of such drunkenness such habitual drunkard either squanders or mismanages his property (or places his family in trouble or distress, or transacts his business prejudicially to the interests of his family, his friends or his creditors; or that he uses intoxicating liquors to such an extent that he incurs the danger of ruining his health and shortening his life thereby); such Judge, for any such reasons established before him to his satisfaction, may pronounce the interdiction of such habitual drunkards, and appoint a curator to him to manage his affairs and control his person as in the case of one interdicted for insanity." And the third clause provides that "the interdiction of any person interdicted as an habitual drunkard shall have the same effect as those conferred by the law in force in this Province in the case of interdiction of any person for insanity."

See paper by Dr. Lauder Lindsay, Edin. Med. Jour., Sept., 1870.