These ethically defective persons, when incapable of holding a place in society, are often converted into candidates for the workhouse or the insane hospital, one or the other of which places they reach after they have been, as children, the terror of parents and teachers, through their untruthfulness, laziness, and general meanness, and in youth the shame of the family and the torment of the community and the officers of the law, by thefts, vagabondage, profligacy, and excesses. Finally, they are the despair of the insane hospital, the "incorrigibles" of the prisons, and (Krafft-Ebing might have added) the veritable burdens of the poor-house. If intellectual insanity or crime do not claim them, pauperism or criminality is likely to be their destiny. The moral imbecile may, however, keep within the law, and as in the instance of the "Napoleon of Finance," cited elsewhere from Kiernan, may achieve business success. His descendants often, however, evince degeneracy in an aggravated form. Many of the supposed reformers of various alleged social evils are often of this class. Their morbid egotism takes the direction of cant and sentimentality, so common at certain states in evolution, as points of least resistance. Like Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield, they aim at doing a "big thing for humanity and myself," the humanity being concentrated in "my" ideas. The moral lunatic needs but a slight twist intellectually to become the paranoiac in whom there is, as Spitzka has pointed out,[256] a permanent undercurrent of perverted mental action peculiar to the individual, running like an unbroken thread through his whole mental life, obscured, it may be, for these patients are often able to correct and conceal their insane symptoms, but it nevertheless exists, and only requires friction to bring it to the surface. The general intellectual status of these patients, though rarely of a very high order, is moderately fair, and often the mental powers are sufficient to keep the delusion under check for practical purposes of life. While many are what is termed crochety, irritable, and depressed, yet the sole symptoms of the typical cases of this disorder consist of the fixed delusions. Since the subject matter of the delusion is of such a character that these patients consider themselves either the victim of a plot or as unjustly deprived of certain rights and position, or as narrowly observed by others, delusions of persecution are added to the fixed ideas, and the patient becomes sad, thoughtful, or depressed in consequence. The patient is depressed logically, as far as his train of idea is concerned and his sadness and thoughtfulness have causes, which he can explain, and which are intimately allied with that peculiar, faulty grouping of ideas which constitutes the rendezvous, as it were, of all the mental conceptions of the patient. Nay, the process may be reversed, and the patient, beginning with a