Page:The punishments of China.djvu/11

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Chinese code of penal laws is compiled in such a manner as to have a punishment appropriated for every crime; a series of these is displayed in the following Plates.

The wisdom of the Chinese Legislature is no where more conspicuous than in its treatment of robbers, no person being doomed to suffer death for having merely deprived another of some temporal property, provided he neither uses, nor carries, any offensive weapon. This sagacious edict renders robbery unfrequent; the daring violator of the laws, hesitating to take with him those means, which might preserve his own life, or affect that of the plundered, in the event of resistance, generally confines his depredations to acts of private pilfering, and a robbery, attended with murder, is, of course, very rarely perpetrated. This instance of justice, moderation, and wisdom, in the Laws of China, receives an unfavorable contrast in the decree, which pronounces the wearing of a particular ornament to be a capital crime; and in the custom of attending to the fallacious information, extorted by the Rack.

Various writers have mentioned other punishments, in addition to those represented in this publication, of a much severer nature, which have been inflicted by the Chinese upon criminals, convicted of regicide, parricide, rebellion, treason, or sedition; but drawings, or even verbal descriptions, of these would be committing an indecorous violence on the feelings, and inducing us to arraign the temperance and wisdom, so universally acknowledged in the government of China.

Exclusive of their novelty and information, the principal