p. 29 | Health and Temperance

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 13, 1888

Health and Temperance.

THE PLEA OF DRUNKENNESS.

THE London Observer, commenting upon the sentence pronounced on Daniel Doherty, the American who shot and killed Graham, pronounces it monstrous, and declares that the judgment of Justice Stephen was biased by the opinion he has often expressed that drunkenness increases instead of lessening the gravity of offenses, a sentiment, says the Observer, which is contrary to common sense.

It is very easy to settle a question by such authoritative expression of opinion. It seems to preclude all argument, and to leave no room for debate. To say that a sentiment is contrary to common sense makes it necessary for one who entertains that sentiment to show that he is not a fool, and changes the issue from the original question to something entirely different. In this case, however, Justice Stephen, one of the ablest of the English Judges, needs no defense upon the question of his sanity or his intellectual ability, and the question of whether drunkenness should be held to aggravate or mitigate the guilt of an offender may be fairly considered an open one, in spite of the London Observer's opinion of Justice Stephen.

If a man is responsible for a criminal act, he is equally responsible for the successive steps which lead up to that act. It is true that the law takes cognizance chiefly of the ultimate act, but at the same time it is always the legitimate object of inquiry what were the moving causes to that act; what was the mental attitude of the offender before the commission of the crime, and what was its purpose. This being so, it is surely the weakest of pleas for an offender to urge in his own behalf that he had voluntarily delivered himself up to the domination of the demon of drunkenness, and that the demon, and not he, is responsible for the unlawful act.

An oriental apologue relates that a djinn, or geni, once got a mortal into his power, and gave him his choice whether he would commit murder, or be guilty of adultery, or get drunk. The unwise mortal, thinking to choose the least of the three evils, elected to get drunk; but, says the legend, after he had got drunk, he committed both the other crimes.

The modern drunkard who commits a crime while intoxicated has not the excuse which the oriental sinner might have offered—that of being subject to the control of a supernatural being. His choice is not among three different offenses, but between guilt and innocence of any offense, and if he willfully and deliberately puts into his mouth the enemy which steals away his brains, he has no moral right, and should have no legal right, to plead one fault in mitigation of another.

Modern science, which runs largely to nomenclature, has invented a name, if not the disease, which is dipsomania. Properly understood, dipsomania is an unconquerable and wholly irresistible impulse for intoxicants; but it has become common to call an ordinary drunkard a dipsomaniac. Never was a term more misapplied. The ordinary drunkard is no more a dipsomaniac than is the usual pickpocket a kleptomaniac, or the man who sets fire to a house in order to plunder it and rob its inhabitants a pyromaniac. He is a drunkard because he wants to be a drunkard, and that is all there is of it, and to dignify his vice with a long name, and to seek to shield him from responsibility for his criminal acts behind his own evil conduct, is utter and ridiculous nonsense. Justice Stephen is right. Drunkenness does add to the gravity of an offense, and the law should so consider it.—San Francisco Chronicle.