M'Naughten : a letter to the Lord Chancellor, upon insanity / by J.Q. Rumball.

  • Rumball, James Quilter, 1795-1872
Date:
1843
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: M'Naughten : a letter to the Lord Chancellor, upon insanity / by J.Q. Rumball. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    to be drawn in defence of Christ himself, I would have that object pointed out which will justify its use. The com- mand is universal—it is equally addressed to the soldier, the judge, the king, as to the dark and midnight assassin. However we may dispute a text, the whole intent of Christ’s teaching was to take from man, and leave with God, punitory power; and the necessity for this is ap- parent upon the face of it. Man judges not as God judgeth; he knows not “ to whom much has been given, to whom httle.” No man can estimate the whole of the circumstances—the provocations, passions, more or less of intellect, the temptations, and weakness of controlling power, which a criminal may have inherited from the sins of his forefathers, and his own lamentable education, even to the third and fourth generation;” and as no two men were ever equally guilty, in the commission of pre- cisely the same otfence—as moreover, what is called crime in one country, is virtue in another, and human laws are as capricious as human opinions—so cannot criminahty be measured by the act done, but by the moral responsibility of the agent; the exact amount of which can only be known to God. What would constitute a deep offence in a Christian man, would be venial in a savage, sinless in a child; and as no legislature can nicely weigh all the forgone conclusions, so can no government punish, with- out in every case being guilty of injustice; too much or too little is inevitable. Justice is not even-handed, nor cannot be. Bhnd she must be, and is. If these propositions be true in every instance, however trifling, how awfully important do they become, when we reflect, that laws have been made by Christian men, who devoutly believe in the efficacy of prayer to turn aside wrath—denying man’s intercession for man,—when we remember that not only have men’s lives been valued at forty shilhngs, in a Christian land, but that in the reign of a good king, and a pious one, so late as the time of ■ George the Third, even in our own day, a woman with a babe at her breast, for stealing a piece of cahco, in or- der to supply the necessaries of life, was hung at Tyburn, by that very law which reduced her to distress, by the im- pressment of her Husband, and sending him to sea, and leaving to the widow and the orphan, no resource but theft; no remedy but death! Murder thy name is justice !
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