Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/180

 laid aside by European nations. James the Second himself witnessed the wrenching of "the boot," as a favorite diversion. The assassin who struck Henry the Fourth, was torn limb from limb by horses, under the eye of ladies of the Court. The Inquisition stretched its victims on the rack. Other modes of execution, such as burning alive, sawing asunder, and breaking on the wheel, were common in Europe until a late period. The Turks impaled men, or flayed them alive, and tied women in sacks with serpents, and threw them into the Bosphorus.

Among the ancients, punishments were still more excruciating. The Roman people, so famous for the justice of their laws, inflicted the supreme agony of crucifixion, in which the victim lingered dying for hours, or even days. After the capture of Jerusalem, Titus ordered two thousand Jews to be crucified! How does this act of the imperial Romans compare with the criminal law of "a semi-savage race"?

Under the Hebrew code all these atrocities were unknown. Moses prescribed but two modes of capital punishment, the sword and stoning. The first was inflicted by the avenger of blood, who, pursuing a murderer, overtook him on the road, and instantly despatched him. The assassin was not beheaded, but thrust through, or despatched in any way. For a criminal who was tried and condemned, the ordinary mode of execution was stoning; certainly the most simple, as it required no scaffold, and no weapon but the stones of the desert, and which must have caused death almost instantly. If a criminal had been a notorious offender, his body might be burned