While applying the nomenclature of disease to these exceptional monsters, we need not allow that their atrocities were, at first at any rate, beyond their control.

Moral insanity is often nothing more than the hypertrophy of some vulgar passion--lust, violence, cruelty, jealousy, and the like.

The tyrant, placed above law and less influenced by public opinion than a private person, may easily allow a greed for pleasure or a love of bloodshed to acquire morbid proportions in his nature.

He then is not unjustly termed a monomaniac.

Within the circle of his vitiated appetite he proves himself irrational.