The Sun. — 1863-12-25 (London, England)

CRIME AND HYPOTHETICAL MADNESS.  The defence set up for Mr. Townley in the painful trial which terminated last Saturday at Derby in his conviction for the murder of Miss Goodwin, practically amounts (says the spectator) to this—The prisoner's grandmother had a  brother of whose ten children five were insane, and another brother one of whose children was insane ; also his grandfather had a sister who committed suicide, and a first cou sin who died in a lunatic asylum. Hence, there is reason  to suspect that what is called the germs of insanity were in the prisoner's constitution, and likely to be called into action  by any unusual excitement, This excitement occurred when Miss Goodwin broke off her engagement with him in  order to marry another, and it took the form of a defined theory that a young lady in engaging herself to a man becomes his " property" in the strictest sense of the term —property which he has a right to rescue, even at the cost of her life, from the hands of another—just as he would have a right to shoot his own horse if a highwayman were making off with it. On this theory the prisoner not only acted, but took his stand after the murder as ethically un assailable, refusing entirely to admit his guilt, and asserting that both he and the murdered girl were much happier for this fatal close to her departure from the contract. " I am far more happy now I have done it, and I trust she is." And finally, after some months of imprisonment, this ex. citement took the well-defined and familiar form of belief in an organised conspiracy against his (the prisoner's) happiness and life, which is one of the commonest of all symptoms of both temporary and permanent nervous disease. This is, we believe, the whole of the ease for Mr. Townley's mental derangement ; first, a presumptive case is brought forward to show that there were physical causes at work far from unlikely to produce it; then it is shown that, at least as a result of the imprisonment, nervous disease and illusion had probably t been produced, whence an inference is suggested that the murder, which might otherwise have been due eithg to criminal but sane perversity of the will, or to tte absolute dominance of Mr. Townley's intellect by notions which left his will no moral choice, no power of resistance in the matter, was, in fact, due to the latter cause, which implies of course irresponsibility; and this conclusion is supported by the self-possession with which, in the first moment of the murder, Mr. Townley justified his deed. We suspect that the only point in this case which at all affects the public imagination, is the proof that both in the prisoner's grandfather's and in his grandfather's family the tendency to insanity did, in fact, show itself decidedly. The other evidence, which is extremely shadowy at best, would only show that the excitement of the crime, of the suspense of awaiting a trial for life, and of the melancholy incidents of the imprisonment, had slightly strained a nervous system never very tough or sound. But the vague physical ideas which we attach t;) "hereditary seeds of insanity" are to common minds much more impressive. They suggest the existence of something like organic fungi in the corners of the intellect which a momentary shock may  stimulate into sudden vitality till the whole framework of the mind is unroofed—just as the tenderest plant pushing up from the crevice in a wall will often rend the timbers and  unroof the masonry of the most solid building. Moreover, the term " seeds of insanity" takes advantage of our  absolute incapacity to test the motive forces of any other mind, and appears to suggest an easy explanation (though it really only apologises for not suggesting any) of eccentric actions that would otherwise puzzle and baffle ordinary men. Instead of thinking any more of the unintelligible action before us, we think of the equally unintelligible actions of the per petrator's grandfather, and having got the unintelligility two generations back, we feel absolved from the duty of interpretation. But the truth is, that to prove a possibility of hereditary disease can only be of any value to the argument, where it can be shown that that hereditary disease, if really active, would account better for the facts of the case than any more ordinary hypothesis. If a man were subject to hereditary consumption, no physician would take that as the explanation of an actual ophthalmia or rheumatism. This is alawys forgotten with reference to violent actions like murder, which, it is assumed, are more intelligible if supposed to spring from a vague general cause like " hereditary insanity," than from an ordinary special cause like jealous passion and the theories which passion engenders in a brooding mind. Now,where hereditary:insanityreallyabsolves from responsibility for violence, it is, we conceive, usually more easy to verify than any other moral cause of violence. It may lead to violence in three ways—by generally weakening the moral judgment to a point obviously far below that of average common sense, so as to leave little intellectual moral control. Next, hereditary insanity may either render a man blind to a whole class of real impressions which affect other people, or, what is the same thing, the victim of a whole class of false and delirous impressions which do not affect other people, so as in either case to justify violence, if only the world as it presents itself to the mind of the patient were the world as it is, and, therefore, so as to exculpate him iu his blindness or his delirium for using it. Finally, without disturbing a man's intellect directly, it may subject him to periodic maniacal impulses, which intoxicate for the moment like a draught of spirits, and drive him on to specific ends. In the first case, there must be a general decay of the whole mental powers, and that cannot very well happen without ample warning and plenty of subsidiary evidence. In the second case, the specific error of conception, whether blindness or delirium, on which the murder proceeded, must be more or less distinguishable, if it is more than the most random surmise. It is no more justifiable to plead generally a blind spot in the intellect as an excuse for murder. without showing how it operated, than to plead physical blindness as an excuse, without showing how blindness betrayed the blind man into doing what he would not have done if his eyes had been like other people's.