"When we find a man lurking for many days together in a particular locality, having about him loaded weapons--watching a particular individual who frequents that locality--a man who does not face the individual and shoot him, but who coolly waits until he has an opportunity of discharging the weapon unobserved by his victim or others--the circumstances appear to show such a perfect adaptation of means to ends, and such a power of controlling his actions, that one is quite at a loss to understand why a plea of irresponsibility should be admitted, except upon the fallacious ground that no motive could be discovered for the act--a ground, however, which was not allowed to prevail in the case of Courvoisier, Francis, and the perpetrators of other atrocious crimes. Observe the lively sense of his danger, and of his rights and interests, as an accused person, exhibited by M'Naughten almost immediately after committing the act--when, fearful lest an inadvertent admission should be given in evidence against him, he said to the officer[35]--'_But you won't use this against me?_' Note the matter-of-fact astuteness with which he attended to his pecuniary interests in May and July; the total absence of any evidence of the existence of his delusions during his last sojourn in London; the presence of such proof of careful, deliberate, and too successful perpetration, as to time, opportunity, and means; his expression in November towards Sir Robert Peel--'D----n him!' But, above all, is to be noted the time when he first gives utterance to anything directly and cogently favouring the notion on which his life depended--his insane delusion with regard to Sir Robert Peel--viz., after he had been for some time incarcerated in Newgate, and when he knew that he was being examined by a physician, in order to ascertain what had been his state of mind at the time in question! Dr Munro has there recorded it.[36] He said--'Mr Salmond, the Procurator-Fiscal, Mr Sheriff Bell, Mr Sheriff Alison, and _Sir Robert Peel_, might have put a stop to this system of persecution if they would!' ... 'We _were afraid of going out after dark for fear of assassination_: that individuals were made to appear before him like them he had seen in Glasgow.' ... 'That _he imagined the person at whom he fired at Charing Cross_ to be one of the crew--a part of the system that was destroying his health. He observed, that, _when he saw the person at Charing Cross at whom he fired_, every feeling of suffering which he had endured for months and years rose up at once in his mind, and that he conceived that he should obtain peace by killing him.'"