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EDWARD D. WORRELL. 53

the kind and gentle do not in a day grow hungry for blood.
Such violent and sudden antagonisms are the surest evidence
of mental disease. The law of evidence permitting proof of
good character in eriminal cases is founded upon this philos-
ophy of man’s nature, and it is a true philosophy. It is in-
troduced as proof that the crime was not committed, not to
exense it. If piety, honesty, gentleness may perish or turn to
their opposites in a moment, if they cannot furnish any re-
sigtance to the influence of evil, are they worthless? It is not
so. There ia a vis inertiae in the moral as in the physical
world by which virtue as well as a stone has a tendency to
remain in the place; and this law presents us with one of the
most unerring guides to truth,

T shall ask you to try the prisoner’s mental condition by
the standard of his normal character, such as the evidence
may establish, I shall endeavor to make you familiar with
his history from boyhood up to the present time, and I
invoke your candid attention to every fact which the evi-
dence may disclose of epileptic fits or uncontrollable insane
impulse. In one or both of these forms, if at all, the insan-
ity of the prisoner will be manifested.

Gentlemen, I have said what it was my purpose to say
in tliese opening remarks, but I may not take my seat with-
out some reference to the triumphant inquiries of my friend
80 put by air and tone and manner as to imply not difficulty
only, but impossibility in the answer.

“Do the insane ever act from motive??? “Do the insane
ever steal!’? Yes! I answer to each question and to both.
Yea, the insane act often upon motive, and the insane steal.
Blood does not offer the only attraction to the insane.
They steal and commit arson as well as murder; the light of
burning houses gives ecstacy to the insane, in some modifi-
cations of the disease, and in others they can’t keep their
hands from picking and stealing. There is not a respectable
author of this century on the subject of insanity who does
not sustain the fact. While I thus answer it is nevertheless
true that “motive” is a consideration of value in our in-
quiry as a test of insanity. The apparent motive deduced

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