$ THE REVISED REPORTS BEING A REPUBLICATION OF SUCH CASES IN THE ENGLISH COURTS OF COMMON LAW AND EQUITY, FROM THE YEAR 1785, AS ARE STILL OF PRACTICAL UTILITY. EDITED BY SIR FREDERICK POLLOCK, BART., D.C.L., LL.D., LATE CORPUS PROFESSOR OF JURISPRUDENCE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. ASSISTED BY O. A. SAUNDERS AND ARTHUR B. CANE, BOTH OF THE INNER TEMPLE, BARRISTERS-AT-LAW, VOL. LIX. 1841-1844. O CLARK & FINNELLY; 4 MOORE, P. C.; 3 BEAVAN; 2 DRURY LONDON: SWEET AND MAXWELL, LIMITED, 3, CHANCERY LANE. BOSTON : LITTLE, BROWN & CO. 1903. PREFACE TO VOLUME LIX. AMONG the House of Lords cases in this volume will be found the celebrated answer of the Judges to questions arising out of M'Naghten's case (p. 85), with the separate opinion of Maule, J. The authority and value of the rules laid down by the majority have been repeatedly discussed from every point of view, and we have no desire to add to the literature of the subject. Perhaps some of the discussion might have been more profitable if lawyers had always borne in mind that there is no such thing as absolute sanity or insanity, and the relation of a given person's faculties to the normal standard of intelligence is and must be a question of fact; and if some medical men, on the other hand, had been less hasty to assume, as if it were a necessary general proposition of morals and law, that no person of unsound mind can ever be responsible for his acts, and had been more willing to understand that whether, on the facts proved (including any proper scientific inferences of fact), a man is or is not responsible is and must be a question of law. Much harm has been done here, as elsewhere, by premature zeal for definition. R. v. Millis, p. 134, and in a less degree the less famous. Privy Council case of Escott v. Mastin, p. 351, show the astonishing ignorance of the Canon Law which prevailed. even among very learned persons in this country sixty years ago. The certainly wrong result of R. v. Millis (for one can hardly call it a decision) gave occasion to Lord Campbell, some years later, to lay down a dogma which had even less historical foundation, that of the judicial infallibility of the House of Lords. His doctrine, though contrary, so far as we know, to the practice of every other court of last resort in the world, has been confirmed in our own time without any pretence of serious consideration. In this very volume |