“As I found myself ill-used by my employers, and felt a horror of life, I formed the design of assassinating the king, so as not to have to kill myself,” he said to the magistrate, immediately after his arrest. To the judge Azzaritti, “I attempted the king’s life in the certainty that I should be killed.” In fact, two days previously, he had been much more occupied with his dismissal from his place than with projects of regicide; and at his arrest he did all he could to make his situation more serious, reminding the delegate that he had forgotten his revolutionary card on which was written, “Death to the King! long live the Republic!” It was a case of indirect suicide, such as Maudsley, Crichton, Esquirol,[430] and Krafft-Ebing have recorded in great numbers. These, however, are only committed by the insane, or by cowardly and immoral men; and I insist upon this motive all the more that he formed at the same time the means of satisfying that incoherent vanity which in him predominated over the love of life. It is well known that many vain suicidal maniacs enjoy the sight of their own death surrounded by pomp, like the Englishman who had a mass composed and executed in public, and shot himself while the Requiescat was being chanted.
If, therefore, we find in him any fanaticism, it is not for politics, but for his own ridiculous and ungrammatical effusions. When he lost his temper and shed tears at the trial, the outburst was not provoked by any insult to his party, but by a refusal to permit the reading of one of his letters, and when his reputation as a scullion was attacked by the assertion that he was continually reading instead of washing up the dishes, which he flatly denied, though the implied proof of unsoundness of mind would have been entirely in his favour.
His intelligence might be called unusual and original rather than superior to the average; and appeared much more brilliant in his conversation than in his writings—in which it is difficult to find a vigorous expression, such as we so frequently meet with in the works of the insane, as distinguished from mattoids.
However, searching here and there amid the enormous mass of his writings, and piecing out their gaps, we meet with some few fragments which are both original and curious. For example, though grotesque enough, his idea of having deputies and officials chosen by lot, like soldiers for the conscription, “that they may not be so proud,” is not without originality. Equally striking is the idea of forcing the convicts, who pass their time in enforced idleness, to cultivate waste lands, of calling out the young men for conscription before they have chosen a trade, and of crying after the Emperor William who “wants five milliards from France”: “He who sows thorns should be made to walk barefoot.” Good, too, in its way, though somewhat Turkish, is that of establishing a free inn for travellers in every village.
Still more remarkable is this, which, if it had not been written some time previously, might be taken as referring to his own case: “It is blamable that the authorities should exercise severity of punishment towards a man whose only idea is to change the form of government and attack the head of the State. The country is the mother of all without distinction; to all, without distinction, the law should be sister of death, which has no respect for any, but cuts them down when their time has come.”
His contrast between man isolated and man in association with his fellows is worthy of Giusti. “When you see him alone he is weak as a glass tumbler—if you see a glass, think of the strength of man, there is no great difference; but, united, men become hard and have the strength of a thousand Samsons.”
Where he really appeared superior to the average was in his viva-voce answers. Thus: “History studied practically among the people is more instructive than the history studied in books. The people is the best teacher of history,” &c. To justify the literary pretensions which seemed so inconsistent with his position as a poor cook, he replied, “Where the learned man goes astray, the ignorant often triumphs.”
When asked what takes place in the conscience when one is about to commit a bad action, he replied, “In us there are, as it were, two wills—one pushing us on, the other holding us back,—and the one that proves strongest determines the action.”
But it is precisely in his intermittent flashes of political insight, so strange in his position, that a morbid abnormality becomes evident. For it must be remarked that they constitute rather the exception than the rule. What we find, as a rule, is the commonplace and the absurd. In the same code he proposes to hang coiners and burn thieves, and abolish the death penalty! He wishes to kill the king, yet in another article he demands for him a pension of two-and-a-half millions![431]
Guiteau.—The same thing may be said of Guiteau, who presented an enormous number of degenerative characteristics. His handwriting is quite that of the mattoid; and he was descended from a family which counted among its members many lunatics and fanatics. Advocate, theologian, politician, and swindler, he had tried all trades, and claimed to have made a great discovery about the birth of Christ. The fact is that he had spoilt a great deal of paper, and issued one or two journals and ridiculous works on The Existence of Hell and on Truth which he believed to be written under Divine dictation. He thought that God would pay his debts as a reward for his eccentric preachings; it was in obedience to a Divine command that he killed Garfield—yet it was only done in revenge for his failure to appoint him U.S. consul at Liverpool, ambassador to Austria, &c.—which showed great ingratitude on Garfield’s part, considering the trouble Guiteau had taken, in his own belief, to secure his election as President.[432]