Chapters in the English Law of Lunacy. tried at the Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey, London, before Chief-Justice Tindal, Mr. Justice Williams and Mr. Justice Cole ridge, on a charge of having murdered Mr. Edward Drummond, the private secretary of Sir Robert Peel, then prime minister of England. The prosecution was conducted by Sir William Follett, the solicitor-general; and Mr., afterwards Sir, A. E. Cockburn was the leading counsel for the defense. The material facts of the case lie within small compass. The prisoner was the natural son of a turner in Glasgow. Having served with his father as a journeyman for three years, he was apprenticed, and then settled in business on his own account. He was of steady temperate habits, but taciturn of dis position. After a time McNaghten began to labor under the well-known " mania of suspicion." He believei that he was perse cuted and haunted by spies night and day. Apart from this delusion he was rational and shrewd, with the shrewdness of his race. In 1842, he went to London. Sir Robert Peel was Tory prime minister, and McNaghten seems to have been possessed with the idea that if his life were taken away the persecution to which he thought him self subject would cease. He watched the movements of the premier closely and hung about the Government buildings near White hall. On Friday, January 20, Mr. Drum mond was returning from Charing Cross to the prime minister's official residence in Downing Street. McNaghten, who was on the outlook, mistook his identity and shot him from behind. The unfortunate gentle man died January 25. The fact that McNaghten had done the deed was indispu table and undisputed, and his only chance of escape was a plea of insanity. The English law as to the criminal respon sibility of the insane was then, as we have seen, in the second stage of its development The " wild beast " theory promulgated by Mr. Justice Tracy in King v. Arnold had been replaced by the " general right and
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wrong theory," in the twilight of which Bellingham and Bowler were judicially murdured. In defending Hadficld, in 1801, Erskine had endeavored to make delusion the test of criminal responsibility in mental disease. But there can be no doubt that the accepted law of England in 1843 was correctly stated by Sir William Follett in his opening speech on the prosecution of McNaghten. "The whole question will turn upon this — if you believe the prisoner at the bar, at the time that he committed this act, was not a responsible agent; if you believe that when he fired the pistol he was incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong; if you believe that he was under the influence and control of some disease of the mind which prevented him from being conscious that he was committing a crime; if you believe that he did not know that he was violating the law, both of God and of man, then, undoubtedly, he is entitled to your acquittal. But . . . nothing short of that will excuse him upon the principle of the English law. To excuse him, it will not be sufficient that he labored under partial insanity upon some subjects; that he had a morbid delusion of mind upon some subjects which could not exist in a wholly sane person; that is not enough if he hadthatdegree of intellect which enabled him to know and distinguish between right and wrong; if he knew what would be the effect of his crime and consciously com mitted it, and if with that consciousness he willfully committed it." Now if this were — and it was — an accurate exposition of the law, there was no evidence that McNaghten was legally insane, and he ought in strictness to have gone the way of Bellingham and Bowler. But Cockburn proved himself no unworthy successor of Erskine, and gained a signal victory, not only over the Crown, but over the law. The exordium of his speech, although somewhat flowery, is singularly effective, and as it is ъ. fair exam ple of his early forensic style we shall give a few extracts from it :
