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have lost more than one case; in fact, I know that it was only in one instance that I failed to establish the lunacy of the prisoner under trial. My last case before I left London was the Saunderson murders. Four months before Saunderson came to trial I said that he was a lunatic and could not plead. You must understand that in England the question is asked if a man is sane now, and if he was insane at the time the murder was committed. If he is insane when the trial comes on, he cannot be tried; and in either case he cannot plead. Saunderson was a young man under twentyfive. As soon as I saw him and talked with

country and England, so as to aid in arriving at
a system which shall combine the utmost sim-
plicity with the greatest excellence. It is in
many respects the most important work in the
way of law reform which has been suggested or
undertaken for many years. It is quite proba-
ble that the commission appointed in this State
to report as to the revision of the Code of Pro-
cedure will find it very desirable to postpone
any definite action in the matter until the data
suggested has been gathered and a study made
by competent persons from its results as to the
very best method of procedure, based upon the
experience of all English speaking countries.
The newly elected President of the American him for a while I became certain that he was a

Bar Association, Mr. Moorfield Story, of Bos-
ton, is a man of wide culture as well as of ex-
tensive practice. He has been much interested
in the work of the association, and last year
delivered the annual address at Saratoga upon
"American Legislation," which attracted much
attention. He is a man of middle age, active
and energetic, and will doubtless do much to-
ward forwarding the interests of the association.
J. Newton Fiero, of Albany, was elected as
Vice-President for the State of New York, and
William H. Robertson, of Westchester, elected
a member of the General Council, having
charge of the affairs of the association. Several
prominent members of the bar of the State
were selected as members of the local council
which controls the matter of admission to the
association of members of the bar from this
State.

The Medico-Legal Society commenced its
congress at the United States court rooms in
the city of New York, on the 4th, 5th and 6th
of September, under a committee of arrange-
ments of which Hon. Rastus S. Ransom was

chairman, and Clark Bell, Esq., secretary. Many
eminent doctors and lawyers have consented to
read papers, and, among others, Dr. Forbes
Winslow of London will discuss "Suicide, con-
sidered as a Mental Epidemic." In a recent in-
terview Dr. Winslow gave many interesting and
valuable facts from his experience, which has
been greatly devoted to insanity in criminal
cases, on which he said:

For years past I have testified in a great
number of cases, and I don't believe that I

So.

homicidal lunatic. Five other doctors examined him and said he was a perfectly sane man, and that he could plead. In face of this oppohe was to be brought to trial, but the day besition the prosecution decided against me, and fore the day fixed for the trial the chief attendant of the prosecution went to the prison to see Saunders, and after talking with him realized that he was crazy, and came to me to say Saunderson's was an auricular mania. He heard voices compelling him to commit the murders, but rather than be tried as a lunatic, he suppressed the fact so skillfully that he impressed everybody as being a man of sound sense. It is just this shrewdness in criminals and this apparent saneness which lead people to believe that they are responsible, when, as a matter of fact, they are homicidal lunatics. In my opinion a very small proportion of men accused of crime are sane.

66 'An instance of this, and the way the law treats it, occurred in a murder known in England as the Old Kent road murder.

A wretched old man killed his wife and almost succeeded in cutting his throat. If the point of the knife had reached an inch further it would have cut his jugular vein and the verdict of a coroner's jury would have been that he had killed his wife and committed suicide when temporarily insane. But it happened that the knife did not penetrate far enough to kill him. So as soon as he was well enough to come out of the hospital he was dragged to the Old Bailey and tried for murder. He was wretchedly wounded, with a great hole in the side of his throat, but the jury decided that he was not insane, and

he was hanged. I talked to him in his cell at recess on the day of his trial, and was convinced that he was a lunatic. It turned out to be true, for after his death a lot of letters written by him were found, and they were perfectly irresponsible, indicating undoubtedly that their writer was insane.

"Not only are most murderers homicidal lunatics, but homicidal lunacy in London is increasing very rapidly, particularly among young men between sixteen and twenty-five years old. I think the increase comes chiefly from the force of imitation. These boys read about men who have committed murders; their minds become filled with the stories of them; the pulpit does all that it can to make the situation worse by preaching about these men, and this combination has its effect on their youthful minds. They want to do something of the same kind themselves to attract the same attention to them, and I am certain it is this motive which is the strongest now in the increase of the number of young men in London who are tried for murder. But they are homicidal lunatics just the same, even if it be only this force of imitation which inspires them. They are not responsible; their brains are affected. Homicidal lunacy, unlike suicidal lunacy, is curable. A homicidal lunatic may recover entirely from the attack which led him to commit a certain crime, but at the same time he will never be safe at large. Of all the men that are saved from the gallows in England by establishing their lunacy not one has ever been set free. They are all sent to Broadmoor prison, the prison for the criminal insane. From suicidal lunacy a patient rarely recovers, even for a brief period. It takes the form of melancholy, and for that reason it is rarely ever shaken off. When I go into a room and find a man raving, with three men holding him down, I feel very much more encouraged than if he walks into my presence quietly and soberly, with a look of 'melancholy.

"One case that I had, and the most striking instance of the force of imitation in leading young men to crime, particularly murder, is that of a boy who had been arrested for killing his brother. When I went to see him he was raving and three keepers were necessary to hold him, but I stayed in the room alone quieting him by talking with him, and in a moment

He told

or two he was lying quietly on his cot. me that for several years he had attended murder trials habitually, and read the reports of those that he couldn't get to. He became so possessed with the thought of them that his mind was affected ultimately, and he turned and killed his own brother one day with no provocation.

"My theory of the Jack the Ripper murders was that they were the work of a religious maniac who fancied that he had some grudge to pay against these women. When I proposed this theory first in London. I got letters from every quarter. After the third murder I got one signed 'Jack the Ripper,' saying: 'This week you shall hear from me.' The police at Scotland Yard got the same letter in the same handwriting, which proved also to be the same writing that was found on the arches in Whitechapel after the murders were committed. One of the people who wrote to me at that time was a lodging-house keeper. He said that a young medical student lived with him, and he described this man's actions on the nights when the first three murders occurred. At each time he had gone from the house differently dressed, and had come back with his shoes and clothes covered with blood. He was a religious monomaniac and went to St. Paul's Cathedral every morning. He came home after the murders, changed his clothes, and got out of the house in time to go to early service. The men that kept the lodging-house told me these facts. I investigated them and found them to be true. I got a pair of the man's shoes that were covered with human blood. After the third murder the medical student disappeared and no trace could be found of him. I went to Scotland Yard and asked them to assist me in the matter and put an officer at my disposal, so that we could look for the man, but they refused to do that, and I was unwilling to undertake the whole thing myself. Later, I wrote to one of the newspapers an account of this young man and my theory of the way in which the murders were committed. From that time there was not another murder, and that strengthened me more than ever in the belief that I could hit upon the right man. Somewhat later the body of this medical student was found in the Thames. He had drowned himself.

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"I was very much interested in the case of
Mrs. Maybrick. I believe now that she will be
out of prison in six months. I handed up the
petition to the Home Office for her release, and
it was Mr. Matthews' refusal to pardon her
which cost him his place under the present gov-cloak room.
ernment. I found that Maybrick had taken
arsenic two days before he died, which had been
prescribed by his physician. Mrs. Maybrick
was arrested simply on the ground that arsenic
was found in her husband's body. The arsenic
which he took was ample to explain the pres-
ence of what was found in his body after
death.

"I have been witness in most of the principal
cases the last twenty years.
Once I testified in
two murder cases on the same day at places 200
miles apart.
A man named Richardson had
shot two people at Ramsgate. I went down
there and proved that he was unable to plead
When I got back to town that afternoon I found
a telegram begging me to come down to a place
where a man named Taylor, who had killed a
child in his wife's arms and afterward a police-
man who attempted to arrest him, was to be
tried for murder the next day. I got down
there and found the entire sentiment of the
town against the man. I gave my testimony
proving that he was a lunatic irresponsible for
his acts, and he was acquitted. I was almost
lynched when I left the town, the indignation
against me being so great, but I had the satis-
faction of learning later that I was right. The
man was sent to prison as a religious maniac,
and three months later, in a mania of religious
excitement, he tore both his eyes out.

"I have had a great deal of experience in
kleptomania, particularly of late, and it seems
to me the cases are growing very much more
frequent. I attribute that also to the force of
imitation, just as in the cases of murder. It is
very difficult to get a rich man off on a plea of
kleptomania. It is very much easier to get a
poor man off on that ground, but whenever the
prisoner is a man of means the cry always is
'there is one law for the rich and another for
the poor.' Even in cases when women are ar-
rested with false pockets in their dresses and
men with false pockets in their coats it may be
just as much a case of kleptomania as when
such elements were not present. I had a case

recently of a man who stole small sums of money in a club. The members had been losing money, from time to time, with no idea where it went. It was generally missed out of the pockets of their coats which hung in the One day some marked coins were put there-a couple of shillings and a sixpence or two. They were afterward found in the possession of this gentleman, who was a member of this club. His rooms were searched, and in them were found a great number of pipes, cigarette boxes, cigars, etc., which he had taken at the club. He told me that he would walk to the door of the cloak room, and a voice would say to him, 'Go over there and take the money out of that coat pocket.' He said that it was repeated until he was compelled to obey it, and it was only when he found himself up stairs with a few silver coins or a cigarette case in his could not take the articles back, for he could taken them. When he was arrested there were never remember from what pockets he had six pounds in gold pieces of his own money in his pocket along with a small silver coin which

hand that he realized what he had done.

he had stolen.

66

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A woman came into my hospital once in
London, and after examining her I wrote the
Four
entry kleptomaniac' after her name.
months later she was arrested in Brighton for
theft. I went down there to see her, found that
she was the same person, and succeeded in
having her discharged, as I had diagnosed her

case four months before when I had no other
feature of the mania was.
means than examination of learning what the

"Moral lunacy, which is the general descrip-
tion under which cases of this kind would come,
takes many forms, and
takes many forms, and it is impossible to tell in
what way it will manifest itself. Kleptomania
is one of them. Oscar Wilde has had a re-
markable career, and I have no doubt of his in-
sanity. I could not be persuaded that he was
responsible for what he did. I never have seen
him except on the street, but I believe him to
be insane.

ment.

"I am radically opposed to capital punishIn Belgium, where it has been abolished, murder has decreased. I believe the same result would follow in any country. We have now in England 94,081 lunatics out of a population of 30,000,000. I was reading the

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other day in a paper which my father edited fifty-one years ago, a description of the American lunatic asylums. At that time we were only passing a lunacy law, trying to do something to help these unfortunates, but as early as that, according to this letter from America, your institutions were built on a splendid scale and splendidly equipped. I expect to see them all before I return to England."

The Institute of International Law held at Cambridge, England one of its most successful sessions, and has materially increased the chances of securing some increased recognition of the laws of one country by another, as well as uniformity of laws. The Daily News furnishes a very complete history of the Institute and on this subject says: The institute was constituted some twenty years ago by Mr. RolnJacquemyns, who, after a varied experience, theoretical and practical, in Belgium, the Congo State and elsewhere, is now prime minister to the King of Siam. It consists of specialists in international law, most of whom have established their claims to an European reputation. Dr. von Bas (Gottingen), Professors De Martens (St. Petersburg), international adviser to the Russian government, Matzen (Copenhagen), Beirrao (Lisbon), Catellani (Padua), and Professors Westlake and Holland, of Cambridge and Oxford respectively, were among the most distinguished delegates.

The discussion commenced with the Geneva Convention of 1864 for the protection of the wounded in the time of the war, which all the European powers have signed. The experience of the Franco-Prussian war goes to prove that either side in the throes of a death struggle will be quick to accuse the other of breaches of the Convention, and to threaten to retaliate by acts of similar brutality. What is specially wanted is machinery for inquiry, so that the truth may be at once ascertained. The conduct of the Japanese in connection with the massacre of Port Arthur shows that even a nation outside the European family feels it dare not face the charge of proved cruelty to the wounded. Various schemes for preventing infractions of the Convention were suggested. M. van der Beer-Portugael, a Belgian general, favored the idea of a permanent military com

An

mission to hold inquiries in such cases. other proposal was that each belligerent should depute military authorities of its own to act as a check on their brother officers; but quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Finally the proposition of M. Lammasch, of Austria, was adopted, that either belligerent complaining of violations should be able to appeal to a neutral State, who should exercise the sort of voluntary supervision of a bystander in a street fight; the State appealed against must hold the inquiry, punish the offender and report what has been done to this neutral government. This scheme has, perhaps, the merit of being a trifle less unworkable than the others, but the position of the neutral State as a registration office can be no guarantee of the bona fides of the inquiry.

A pro

Proposed modifications of the Berne Convention for the international protection of copyright also occupied considerable time; the agreement was signed in 1886, and a meeting of delegates of all the signatory Powers, including England, will take place in Paris in the autumn to consider the question of revision. The proposals adopted by the late conference will doubtless have great weight with the revision committee. Roughly speaking, at present copyright is protected in two cases: (a) If the author be a subject of a signatory Power, wherever the place of publication; (6) If the work be published in the country of a signatory, whatever the nationality of the author. posal to extend the privilege. in the first case to strangers domiciled in the territory was rejected, and does indeed appear to throw open the door too widely, and to cut down the privileges secured by signing the treaty. It was decided also to recommend: 1. The extension of the period during which translations should be protected from ten to twenty years. 2. That newspaper articles, so far as they contain literary matter, e. g., short stories or scientific and literary critiques, should be secured; full freedom to reproduce political articles and news should be allowed, provided the source from which they were taken be acknowledged. Two other interesting points were the necessity of printed notice on musical publications reserving expressly the right of performance, as to which the Institute decided against the necessity of express reservation: and the damage done to

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I

the rights of musical authors by the growing popularity of the common musical box.

These, however, are really questions of detail on which the resolutions of a body of savants are somewhat wasted. Questions of principle, such as are involved in contraband of war, nationality, and the privileges of an ambassador, all of which were discussed at the late meeting, afford much more room for useful work in harmonizing and codifying fundamental principles. The law of contraband is a field peculiarly suited for such work. In the great wars of the last two centuries the interest of the great maritime powers has been directly opposed to that of the smaller States, who were usually neutral. The maritime powers naturally wished to make the list of forbidden articles much wider than mere powder and shot, and especially to reserve the right of declaring, as the circumstances of each case arose, what should be considered contraband and what not. In many cases of blockade it may be more important to forbid neutrals carrying provisions to the enemy than powder and shot. The neutral powers, on the other hand, tried to restrict the list to munitions of war, and especially rejected the theory of occasional contraband altogether. The two armed neutralities of 1780 and 1800 attempted to secure the adhesion of all Europe to this idea, so as to compel "perfidious Albion" to give up her iniquities in this respect. England, however, is not the only country which has maintained the right of varying the list according to circumstances. America has done the same. And it is interesting to find that, with the growth of her navy, Germany recognizes the necessity of the English custom. On the motion of M. Perels, of the German admiralty, the Institute rejected the principle of a fixed catalogue, and adopted that of the belligerent's right to vary the list provided that neutral powers had full notice by proclamation before confiscation was attempted.

The questions involved in the word nationality again are many, and crying aloud for some system of settlement. Has a man a right to resign his allegiance to his mother country at will and adopt that of another State? To our continental neighbors with their lengthy periods of service, this is a vital question. England

answered the question in the negative till 1870, but now allows free right of expatriation to British subjects. The institute decided in favor of freedom to break the tie, but suggest that the mother country may still require such preliminary conditions to be satisfied as will practically destroy the right altogether. If it be recognized that Germany may still require three years' service of every subject, one of the chief inducements for Germans to be naturalized in America will have disappeared. Again, if an American woman marry an Englishman, she is at present an English woman in England, an American in America. The institute refused to admit the principle that any one can have two nationalities, and if this were generally adopted it would clear the ground of many difficulties.

English lawyers are tempted to ask what practical use these abstract rules and resolutions can have. It is quite clear that immediately they bind no one, not even their authors. But, undoubtedly, though the direct results may not be very obvious, indirectly the institute does much to promote international harmony. The discussion, in cold blood, of disputed points tends to remove prejudice and disarm suspicion, as the results of the recent debates on contraband law proved. While the presence of so many professors from all parts of Europe at these conferences must mean that the views of the rising generation of law students will be brought into line in a way hitherto impossible.

In the present day, when so much is said about women's rights, it will delight many to know that, although the judicial bench is now monopolized by the sterner sex, we believe at least once in the history of England a woman has acted as judge. This was in the reign of Henry VIII., and the woman to whom the unique honor fell was the Lady Ann Berkeley, of Yate, in Gloucestershire. She had appealed to the king to punish a party of rioters who had broken into her park, killed the deer, and fired the hayricks and His Majesty granted to her and others a special commission to try the offenders, armed with which she opened a commission, empanneled the jury, heard the charge, and, on a verdict of "Guilty" being returned, pronounced sentence.

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