LAST DOCTOR.--"A practising surgeon for between three and four years. Had attended the prisoner's family." _Question._--"What is your opinion as to his state of mind?" _Answer._--"Decidedly that of imbecility--more imbecility than anything: he is decidedly, in my judgment, of unsound mind. His mother has often told me there was something exceedingly peculiar about him, and asked me what I thought. The chief thing that struck me was his involuntary laughing: he did not seem to have that sufficient control over the emotions which we find in sane individuals. In Newgate, he had great insensibility to all impressions sought to be made on him. His mother once rebuked him for some want of civility to me; on which he jumped up in a fury, at the moment alarming me, and saying 'he would stick her.' I think that was his expression." Questioned by the Counsel for the Crown.--"I never prescribed for the prisoner, nor recommended any course of treatment, conduct, or diet whatever. I never gave, nor was asked for any advice. I concluded the disease was mental--one of those weak minds which, under little excitement, might become overthrown." With every due consideration for these five gentlemen, as expressing themselves with undoubted sincerity and conscientiousness; with the sincerest respect for the medical profession, and a profound sense of the perplexities which its honourable and able members have to encounter in steering their course, when called upon to act in cases of alleged insanity--encountering often equally undeserved censure and peril for interfering and for not interfering--we beg to enter our stern and solemn protest on behalf of the public, and the administration of the justice, against such "_evidence_ of insanity" as we have just presented to the reader. It may really be stigmatised as "The safe committal of crime made easy to the plainest capacity." It proceeds upon paradoxes subversive of society. Moral insanity? Absurd misnomer! Call it rather "_im_moral insanity," and punish it accordingly. Is it not fearful to see well-educated men of intellect take so perverted a view of the conditions of human society--of the duties and responsibilities of its members? Absence of assignable motive an evidence of such insanity as should exempt from responsibility! Inability to resist or control a motive to commit murder a safe ground for immunity from criminal responsibility!--that "criminal responsibility which," as the present Lord Chancellor, in replying for the Crown in Oxford's case, justly remarked, "secures the very existence of society."