Thaw and His Mental Status [excerpt]

     The suicides of insanoids, so often lamented in communities are not infrequently self immolation benefits to self, to contemporary communities and to posterity, thus freed rom [sic] the infliction of possible descendants similarly unfit for normal psychic life and its continuation through descending generations. Society should have security even against the possible and unexpected brain storms of certain of the so-called semi-insane and the semi-responsibles—the “demi fous et demi responsables” about which Grasset writes so well, these victims of demi peans de santi. The world should be [200][201] guarded against them in a protective manner though not always necessarily by insane asylum’s sequestration, against even the complete freedom procurable by writ of habeas corpus. An insanoid is not always the harmless crank he is regarded. He may pass at times and suddenly under the great and adverse brain strain to which too many of them are often subjected through their provocative vagaries of mind, into positive destructive insanity, as the insanoid paranoiac Guiteau did when he murdered President Garfield, and as the paranoid Czolgosz did when he sought and killed President McKinley, and as Booth probably was when he assassinated the revered immortal Lincoln, and the man in the tree before the White House who shot at President Jackson.