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The presses of the publishers grind on and on. Unlike the mills of the gods, they grind rapidly, but like them, the product is ordinarily somewhat small. Now and then, however, there appears in the tidal wave of printed matter, like a case of Scotch in a welter of driftwood, something
really valuable. Now and then comes a book and the audience to which it is addressed, rubs its hands and cries, “Ah, here is something that wanted doing!”
Mr. Glueck's present volume is such a one. For lo! these many years there has been an increasing need for a crystallization of the problems presented whenever the question of mental disorder is brought into jurisprudence. Unfortunately, like the East and West, the lawyer and the psychiatrist have never met on common ground. The former is too often the slave of precedent; too often he is incapable of realizing that the law is not immutable; that it grows gradually, its shape conforming—however vaguely at times—to the social imperative. Beating his head on the musty altars erected to the old-time gods, Coke, Blackstone and Littleton, he fails to note the new stars rising in the East, he fails to hear the dictum that a criminal is not a person who commits a crime, but the end-product of a billion years of phylogeny plus the effects of a highly complicated social state.
On the other hand, the psychiatrist is likely to have become impatient with legal procedure. He has had the experience of having his efforts to throw light upon a difficult case nullified by contentious attorneys. He has seen a group of supposedly intelligent men gathered together to pass upon a social problem—a learned judge, a forceful district attorney, a shrewd counsel for defense and twelve men supposedly fairly representative of civilized society. He has seen this ponderous and expensive machinery perform for several days and weeks and finally produce a solution which he knows is totally ineffective if not monstrously unjust. Small wonder that he comes to feel that