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ewe together out of England, cattle stealing, stealing in a dwelling house, highway rob bery, bigamy, stealing geese from a common, stealing linen from a bleaching ground, let ter stealing, cutting and maiming, damaging the rail or chain of a turnpike gate, cultivat ing the tobacco plant in England, noting, larceny and poaching were all punished by death under the laws passed in the reign of George III. During this period a girl, fourteen years of age, was condemned to be burned alive for an offense under the coining act. In 1788, a woman was burned to death in front of Newgate for a similar offense. A news paper thus describes the scene : " As soon as she came to the stake, she was placed upon the stool, which after some time was taken from under her, when the fagots were placed round her, and, being set fire to, she was consumed to ashes." In the same year, Mary Jones, a young woman whose husband had been EXECUTION impressed as a sea IN ANCIENT MEXICO. through that circumstance man,been and reduced who had to absolute starvation from comparative re spectability, was hanged at Tyburn for steal ing two yards of yellow calico, her infant sucking at her breast on the way to the scaf fold. Treason and murder are now the only crimes punishable by death in Great Britain and her colonies. The infliction of the death penalty for high treason was always barbarous, the judge sentencing the criminal to be drawn on a hurdle to the place of ex ecution, and there hanged, his body to be cut down whilst alive, his entrails taken out and burned before his face, his head to be

cut off and his body quartered, the head and quarters to be at the disposal of the crown. This barbarous penalty remained on the statute book until 1870, when ordi nary hanging was substituted. In Great Britain and her colonies the criminal is hanged; in France he is decapi tated by the guillotine; in many of the German States beheading is also the mode of execution, while in Spain the death pen alty is by means of the garrote, and in New York the more scientific but equally deadly electric current is made the instrument of the State in executing those condemned to death. The Spanish garrote was undoubtedly adopted from the Moors and retained ever since by the least progressive of civilized nations. At first it consisted in simply placing a cord round the neck of the crim inal, who was seated on a chair fixed to a post, and then twisting a cord by means of a stick inserted between it and the back of the neck, till strangulation was produced. The name is derived from garrote, a stick or cudgel. The inquisitors were wont to grant as a favor this mode of strangulation, before being burned, to such condemned persons as recanted. If the executioner was unskil ful the pain was sometimes very great. Llórente, in his " History of the Inquisition," mentions that at an auto-da-fc, at Cuenca, a poor Jew, who had obtained this dismal privilege of preliminary strangulation, notic ing the bungling manner in which the exe cutioner had performed the operation on the two who preceded him, said to the latter : "Peter, if you are likely to strangle me so clumsily, I would much rather be burned alive." The original garrote has given place to a brass collar containing a screw, which the executioner turns until its point enters the spinal marrow where it unites with the brain, causing instantaneous death. Among the forms of death ordered in France there were several which were bar barously cruel. In 1336 Count de Rouci