Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 12.pdf/148

 Executions and Executioners.

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EXECUTIONS AND EXECUTIONERS. BY JOHN DE MORCAN. FROM the remotest times to the present frightful sway. During his reign seventyday the nations of the world, civilized two thousand persons suffered the death and barbarian, have, with rare exceptions, penalty, some being hanged, others be maintained that the death penalty was abso headed, many burned to death and quite a lutely necessary. While philanthropists and number boiled. Queen Elizabeth only signed philosophers have argued against it, the gov the death warrants of four hundred annually, ernments have adhered to it, and so at the end but even Parliament complained of the " daily of the nineteenth century we find capital happenings of horrible murthers, thefts and other great outrages," and asked consent to punishment enforced in nearly all nations. It is not my intention to discuss the policy increase the number of crimes for which of either the retention or the abolition of death was the penalty. We find the following the death penalty, but rather to show the preambleofa law passed in Elizabeth's reign : different modes of inflicting the punishment "WHEREAS, persons, in contempt of God's and the character of the men who have been commands, and in defiance of the law, are found entrusted by the governments with its exe to cut pockets and pick purses even at places of cution, for if there were no executioners public execution, while execution is being done upon criminals, — be it therefore enacted, That there could be no executions. In modern times the death of the crimi all such persons shall suffer death, without benefit nal is brought about by hanging, electrocut of clergy." — (Stow's Annals.) ing, beheading or strangling, but in olden James I hanged and burned thousands times the civilized nations resorted to the for alleged witchcraft and other imaginary most horrible tortures and painful methods crimes, while Charles II used the headsman which cause a feeling of horror to pass over on every possible occasion. Between the us as we recall them. It may be that be accession of William of Orange and the fore the end of the twentieth century the death of George II, no fewer than one hun guillotine, the hangman's rope, the garrote dred thousand persons met their death at and the electric chair will be looked upon the hands of the executioner. The first with the same abhorrence as we now feel years of George Ill's reign were character when we recall the barbarous devices em ized by ferocity and remorselessness. Not ployed in times past. only were the old laws revived, but new The death penalty was the punishment, ones enacted to an extent we can scarcely in England, for all felonies, and the certain credit. Shoplifting to the amount of five doom of those who could not avail them shillings, consorting for a whole year with selves of privilegiutn cléricale, i.e., the com gipsies, breaking down the head of a fish mon law inflicted death on every felon who pond, cutting down an ornamental tree in a could not read, and that punishment was public park or street, coining, sheep-steal implied where a statute made any new of ing, horse-poisoning, forgery, returning from fense felony. transportation, damaging Westminster, Lon In the reign of Henry VIII, there was don or Putney bridges, breaking any tools scarcely a department of human conduct used in woolen manufactures, stealing apples over which the gallows did not bear its growing in an orchard, exporting a ram and