The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1908-01-12

when he told how, in the early days
there was market place in New Eng
land, and there was a Soaffold where
women who sinned were compelled to
stand, wearing the scarlet letter "a, -
while the curious multitude looked on.
The defendant walked upon that wit
ness stand, and she cast her eyes over
the curious multitude. There she was,
upon the scaffold of the law, gazed up
on by the public-a wreck of her for
mer days. You did not see there a bra
zen hussy. You saw worn and feeble
little mother, bearing her cross wear
ing the scarlet letter, but whose face
seemed glorified when she recalled her
Iove-a love that was wreathed with
the smoke of a blazing pistol on that
December day almost one year ago.
The prosecution claims that it was
a cold-blooded, deliberate and wilful
murder. They claim that this woman
has to the law forfeited her life They
say that she threatened, that she pre-
pared, that she deliberated. They claim
that with heart as black as ravens
wings she followed this man on here
to Washington; that she lay in wait
for him; that she entered his room with
a pistol; that she shot him down in
cold blood; and that it is your duty to
send her to the scaffold. But we say,
even assuming all that is claimed by
the prosecution. still this woman is not
guilty-not guilty in the eyes of God,
and not guilty under the law of man;
for this woman was insane.
What Constitutes Insanity.
Insanity is a peculiar disease. We
cannot understand it. The alienists do
- 4
can see what it does; we can control
it at times; and yet we do not under
stand it. This woman was insane: and
to be insane one does not have to be a
raving maniac. One does not have to
strike and tear and kill. One may walk
the streets. apparently as lucid as you
or |, and yet be insane. Walk through
the wards of our asylums, and meet
those there whose minds are so dis
turbed that their friends are compelled
to there confine them; and many a
man and women you will see whom you
would scarcely conceive had anything
wrong with his or her intellect. 1t is
an insidious disease, and no wonder
that the persons who saw this woman
that night did not have the thought en-
ter their minds at the time that her
Ililu WdS ulSlItSSeu, OF IIldC she was
herself insane.
There is a filmy line between sanity
and insanity. The line is so fiImy that
that which is termed genius is some
times, in fact, insanity. In this case
we have what is termed by the alien
lists the causation. We have, first of
all, the hereditary faint, which of it,
self may not produce insanity, but
which renders the subject more likely,
under great stress and strain, to allow
his mind to break away from him, and
to go from its mornings. We have,
first, heredity. Added to that we have
that which they all considerable blow
upon the head when she was a child;
the years of severe headaches, indicat-
ing the severity of that blow. We have,
also, d most delicate and refined ma
ture. We have here before us soul
that delights in the song of birds, that
revels in dainty cOlors, that enjoys the
most touching poetry-high-strung
sensitive. proud. ambitious, capable of
loving with fll the intensity of her in
tense natuTss living in that border land
inhabited X geniI's, but which verges