Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/333

Rh Their basis being mere delusive imagination, when honestly administered their being right or wrong has been matter of mere accident. It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that fair-play ever generally prevailed in the administration of ordeals. As is well known, they have always been engines of political power in the hands of unscrupulous priests and chiefs. Often it was unnecessary even to cheat, when the arbiter had it at his pleasure to administer either a harmless ordeal like drinking cursed water, or a deadly ordeal by a dose of aconite or physostigma. When it comes to sheer cheating, nothing can be more atrocious than this poison-ordeal. In West Africa, where the Calabar bean is used, the administerers can give the accused a dose which will make him sick, and so prove his innocence, or they can give him enough to prove him guilty, and murder him in the very act of proof; when we consider that over a great part of that great continent this and similar drugs usually determine the destiny of people inconvenient to the fetich-man and the chief—the constituted authorities of church and state—we see before us one efficient cause of the unprogressive character of African society. The famed ordeal by red-hot iron, also, has been a palpable swindle in the hands of the authorities. In India and Arabia the test is to lick the iron, which will burn the guilty tongue but not the innocent. Now, no doubt the judges know the secret that innocent and guilty alike can lick a white-hot iron with impunity, as any blacksmith will do, and as I have done myself, the layer of vapor in a spheroidal state preventing any chemical contact with the skin. As for the walking over red-hot ploughshares, or carrying a red-hot iron bar three paces in the palm of the hand, its fraudulent nature fits with the fact that the ecclesiastics who administered it took their precautions against close approach of spectators much more carefully than the jugglers do who handle the red-hot bars and walk over the ploughshares nowadays; and, moreover, any list of cases will show how inevitably the friend of the Church got off, while the man on the wrong side was sure to "lose his cause and burn his fingers." Remembering how Queen Emma in the story, with uplifted eyes, walked over the ploughshares without knowing it, and then asked when the trial was to begin, and how, after this triumphant issue, one-and-twenty manors were settled on the bishopric and church of Winchester, it may be inferred with some probability that in such cases the glowing ploughshares glowed with nothing more dangerous than daubs of red paint.

Almost the only effect of ordeals which can be looked upon as beneficial to society is, that the belief in their efficacy has done something to deter the credulous from crime, and still more often has led the guilty to betray himself by his own terrified imagination. Visitors to Rome know the great round marble mask called the Bocca della Verità. It is but the sink of an old drain; but many a frightened knave has shrunk from the test of putting his hand into its open