upernaturally acute, the reasoning powers are active and unimpaired,
and the patient is convinced that he can do as he wills, whereas, in
reality, he says and does things which later on seem impossible in their
absurdity. Such a condition is equally possible to the victim of mental
disease, where the knowledge of right and wrong has no real relevancy.

The test of irresponsibility as defined by law is hopelessly inadequate,
judged by present medical knowledge. There is no longer any pretence
that a perception of the nature and quality of an act or that it is
wrong or right is conclusive of the actual insanity of a particular
accused. In a recent murder case a distinguished alienist, testifying
for the prosecution, admitted that over seventy per cent. of the
patients under his treatment, all of whom he regarded as insane and
irresponsible, knew what they were doing and could distinguish right
from wrong.

Countless attempts have been made to reconcile this obvious anachronism
with justice and modern knowledge, but always without success, and
courts have wriggled hard in their efforts to make the test adequate
to the particular cases which they have been trying, but only with the
result of hopelessly confounding the decisions.

But, however it is construed, the test as laid down in 1843 is
insufficient in 1908. Medical science has marched on with giant strides,
while the law, so far as this subject is concerned, has never progressed
at all. It is no longer possible to determine mental responsibility by
any such artificial rule as that given by the judges to the Lords in
McNaughten's case, and which juries are supposed to apply in the courts
of today. I say "supposed," for juries do not apply it, and the reason
is simple enough--you cannot expect a juryman of intelligence to follow
a doctrine of law which he instinctively feels to be crude and which he
knows is arbitrarily applied.

No juryman believes himself capable of successfully analyzing a
prisoner's past mental condition, and he is apt to suspect that, however
sincere the experts on either side may appear, their opinions may be
even less definite than the terms in which they are expressed. The
spectacle of an equal number of intellectual-looking gentlemen, all
using good English and all wearing clean linen, reaching diametrically
opposite conclusions on precisely the same facts, is calculated to fill
the well-intentioned juror with distrust. Painful as it is to r