his savage disposition, by inventing tortures to agonize his fellow-man, at which humanity shudders. It is not enough, that a poor unfortunate wretch, in the prime of life, whom depravity has hurried to the commission of crime, should be deprived of his mortal existence,-his soul must be harrowed up at the prospect of the prolonged torments which he must endure, before his spirit is permitted to take its flight to the world unknown. Instead of simply strangling or beheading the unhappy criminal, his flesh must be torn with pincers, his bones dislocated, his hands chopped off, or his body left to pine away in exquisite torments, amidst devouring flames. In Sweden, murder is punished by beheading and quartering, after having previously chopped off the hand. In Germany, Poland, Italy, and other parts of the Continent, it was customary, and, I believe, still is, in some places, to put criminals to death, by breaking them alive on the wheel. The following account is given, by a traveller, who was in Berlin, in 1819, of the execution of a man for murder, which shows that the execution of criminals, in Prussia, is frequently distinguished by a species of cruelty worthy of the worst days of the inquisition. Amidst the parade of executioners, officers of police, and other judicial authorities, the beating of drums, and the waving of flags and colours, the criminal mounted the scaffold. No ministers of religion appeared to gild the horrors of eternity, and to soothe the agonies of the criminal; and no repentant prayer closed his quivering lips. "Never," says the narrator, "shall I forget the one bitter look of imploring agony that he threw around him, as immediately on stepping on the scaffold, his coat was rudely torn from off his shoulders. He was then thrown down, the cords fixed round his neck, which were drawn until strangulation almost commenced. Another executioner then approached, bearing in his hands a heavy wheel, bound with iron, with which he violently struck the legs, arms, and chest, and lastly the head of the criminal. I was unfortunately near enough to witness his mangled and bleeding body still convulsed. It was then carried down for interment, and, in less than a quarter of an hour from the beginning of his torture, the corpse was completely covered with earth. Several large stones,

which were thrown upon him, hastened his last gasp: he was mangled into eternity!"

In Russia, the severest punishments are frequently inflicted for the most trivial offences. The knout is one of the most common punishments in that country. This instrument is a thong made of the skin of an elk or of a wild ass, so hard that a single stroke is capable of cutting the flesh to the bone.-The following description is given by Olearius of the manner in which he saw the knout inflicted on eight men, and one woman, only for selling brandy and tobacco without a license. "The executioner's man, after stripping them down to the waist, tied their feet, and took one at a time on his back. The executioner stood at three paces distance, and, springing forward with a knout in his hand,-whenever he struck, the blood gushed out at every blow. The men had each twenty-five or twenty-six lashes; the woman, though only sixteen, fainted away. After their backs were thus dreadfully mangled, they were tied together two and two; and those who sold tobacco having a little of it, and those who sold brandy a little bottle put about their necks; they were then whipped through the city of Petersburgh for about a mile and a half, and then brought back to the place of their punishment, and dismissed." This is what is termed the moderate knout; for when it is given with the utmost severity, the executioner, striking the flank under the ribs, cuts the flesh to the bowels; and therefore, it is no wonder that many die of this inhuman punishment. The punishment of the pirates and robbers who infest the banks of the Wolga, is another act of savage cruelty common in Russia. A float is built, whereon a gallows is erected, on which is fastened a number of iron hooks, and on these the wretched criminals are hung alive by the ribs. The float is then launched into the stream, and orders are given to all the towns and villages on the borders of the river, that none, upon pain of death, shall afford the least relief to any of these wretches. These malefactors sometimes hang, in this manner, three, four, and even five days alive. The pain produces a raging fever, in which they utter the most horrid imprecations, im

*

ploring the relief of water and other liquors. During the reign of Peter the Great, the robbers who infested various parts of his dominions, particularly the banks of the Wolga, were hung up in this manner by hundreds and thousands, and left to perish in the most dreadful manner. Even yet, the boring of the tongue, and the cutting of it out, are practised in this country as an inferior species of punishment. Such cruel punishments, publicly inflicted, can have no other tendency than to demoralize the minds of the populace, to blunt their natural feelings, and to render criminal characters still more desperate and hence we need not wonder at what travellers affirm respecting the Russians, that they are very indifferent as to life or death, and undergo capital punishments with unparalleled apathy and indolence.

Even among European nations more civilized than the Russians, similar tortures have been inflicted upon criminals. The execution of Damiens, in 1757, for attempting to assassinate Louis XV. King of France, was accompanied with tortures, the description of which is sufficient to harrow up the feelings of the most callous mind-tortures, which could scarcely have been exceeded in intensity and variety, although they had been devised and executed by the ingenuity of an infernal fiend. And yet, they were beheld with a certain degree of apathy by a surrounding populace; and even councillors and physicians could talk together about the best mode of tearing asunder the limbs of the wretched victim, with as much composure as if they had been dissecting a dead subject, or carving a pullet. Even in Britain, at no distant period, similar cruelties were practised. Those who are guilty of high treason are condemned, by our law, to be hanged on a gallows for some minutes; then cut down, while yet alive, the heart to be taken out and exposed to public view, and the entrails burned." Though the most cruel part of this sentence has never been actually inflicted in our times, yet it is a disgrace to Britons that such a statute should still stand unrepealed in our penal code.

*See Hanway's "Travels through Russia and Persia"-Salmon's "Present State of all Nations," vol. 6.-Guthrie's Geography, &c.

The practice, too, of torturing supposed criminals for the purpose of extorting a confession of guilt, was, till a late period, common over all the countries of Europe; and, if I am not mistaken, is still resorted to, in several parts of the Continent. Hence, Baron Bielfeld, in his "Elements of Universal Erudition," published in 1770, lays down as one of the branches of criminal jurisprudence, "The different kinds of tortures for the discovery of truth." Such a practice is not only cruel and unjust, but absurd in the highest degree, and repugnant to every principle of reason. For, as the Marquis Beccaria has well observed, "It is confounding all relations to expect that a man should be both the accuser, and the accused, and that pain should be the test of truth; as if truth resided in the muscles and fibres of a wretch in torture. By this method, the robust will escape, and the feeble be condemned.To discover truth by this method, is a problem which may be better resolved by a mathematician than a judge, and may be thus stated: The force of the muscles and the sensibility of the nerves of an innocent person being given, it is required to find the degree of pain necessary to make him confess himself guilty of a given crime."*

* See Beccaria's "Essay on Crimes and Punishments" p. 52, 56. The following is a brief summary of the principal punishments that have been adopted by men, in different countries, for tormenting and destroying each other. Capital punishments-Beheading, strangling, crucifixion, drowning, burning, roasting, hanging by the neck, the arm or the leg; starving, sawing, exposing to wild beasts, rending asunder by horses drawing opposite ways; shooting, burying alive, blowing from the mouth of a cannon, compulsory deprivation of sleep, rolling in a barrel stuck with nails, cutting to pieces, hanging by the ribs, poisoning, pressing slowly to death, by a weight laid on the breast; casting headlong from a rock, tearing out the bowels, pulling to pieces with red hot pincers, stretching on the rack, breaking on the wheel, impaling, flaying alive, cutting out the heart, &c. &c. &c. Punishments short of death have been such as the following. Fine, pillory, impris onment; compulsory labour at the mines, galleys, highways, or correction-house; whipping, bastonading; mutilation, by cutting away the ears, the nose, the tongue, the breasts of women, the foot, the hand; squeezing the marrow from the bones with screws or wedges, castration, putting out the eyes; banishment, running the gauntlet, drumming, shaving off the hair, burning on the hand or forehead; and many others of a similar nature. Could the ingenuity of the inhabitants of Tophet have invented punishments more cruel and revolting? Has any one of these modes of punishment a tendency to reform the

If the confined limits of the present work had admitted, I might have prosecuted these illustrations to a much greater extent. I might have traced the operations of malevolence in the practice of that most shocking and abominable traffic, the Slave Trade-the eternal disgrace of individuals and of nations calling themselves civilized. This is an abomination which has been encouraged by almost every nation in Europe, and even by the enlightened States of America. And although Great Britain has formally prohibited, by a law, the importation of slaves from Africa; yet, in all her West Indian colonies, slavery in its most cruel and degrading forms still exists; and every proposition, and every plan for restoring the negroes to their natural liberty, and to the rank which they hold in the scale of existence, is pertinaciously resisted by gentlemen planters, who would spurn at the idea of being considered as either infidels or barbarians. They even attempt to deprive these degraded beings of the chance of obtaining a happier existence in a future world, by endeavouring to withhold from them the means of instruction, and by persecuting their instructors. "In Demerara alone there are 76,000 immortal souls linked to sable bodies, while there are but 3,500 whites; and yet, for the sake of these three thousand whites, the seventy-six thousand, with all their descendants, are to be kept in ignorance of the way of salvation, for no other purpose than to procure a precarious fortune for a very few individuals out of their sweat and blood." Is such conduct consistent with the spirit of benevolence, or even with the common feelings of humanity ?-I might have traced the same malignant principle, in the practice of a set of men denominated wreckers, who, by setting up false lights, allure mariners to destruction, that they may enrich themselves by plundering the wrecks-in the warlike dispositions of all the governments of Europe, and the enormous sums which

criminal, and promote his happiness? On the contrary, have they not all a direct tendency to irritate, to harden, and to excite feelings of revenge? Nothing shows the malevolent dispositions of a great portion of the human race, in so striking a light, as the punishments they have inflicted on one another; for these are characteristic, not of insulated individuals only, but of nations, in their collective capacity.