Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 2 (1925-02).djvu/155

 of the other world affirm that once they lost their power to resist, and yielded to what seemed to them to be their inevitable fate, they suffered nothing.

A quick death by violence, which horrifies us more than any other form (as is testified by the inclusion in all our prayer books of petitions to God to save us from violent death), is really the least terrible form, if we are to believe the testimony of many who have been miraculously snatched back to life after suffering some frightful accident. In such accidents, one feels very little pain, because the very thing that would cause agony abolishes all sensation almost instantly. Many men who have fallen from great heights, and have lain for a while as dead men, declared afterwards that they did not feel anything when they struck the earth. A noted hunter of wild beasts, in a recent article, recounts his experiences when attacked and nearly killed by a leopard: the excitement and the struggle were so intense that although one of his arms was practically chewed off and his body horribly lacerated, he felt nothing, but passed suddenly into an unconscious state.

In its desire to punish, or wreak vengeance on criminals, the law has constantly sought methods of execution which, by their frightful nature and the suffering caused to the victim, would discourage men from committing crimes. Such curious data to be found in the works of men of unquestioned sincerity make it doubtful whether the law has succeeded in finding ways of putting criminals to death in a painful manner. The great scientist Lord Bacon tells the story of a knight whose curiosity had been aroused concerning the amount of suffering endured by men being hanged; and he decided to try an experiment to learn whether this form of death were as terrible as it was thought to be. He climbed up on a table and placed around his neck a rope hung from the ceiling, and threw himself into the air with the intention of scrambling back on the table, which he had placed in such a position that he could easily do so, as soon as his agony became unendurable. But the good knight had not foreseen what was going to occur to him, and if one of his friends, who was there to witness his experiment, had not become alarmed by the long time that the knight swung in the noose, and cut him down, the good man would have been as successfully hanged as if the executioner had had charge of the affair! The knight afterwards explained that from the very instant that the noose tightened about his neck, he lost all power of feeling, and although conscious for a while, he did not remember anything about the table, nor did he realize his danger, and he felt no disagreeable sensations, not even suffocation.

This is what probably happens to all who are put to death, whether by hanging, by decapitation, by electricity, or what not; and also to all who suffer death by violence, except in a few cases. It seems impossible that there should be anything more than a sort of instantaneous agony, because almost at the instant of receiving the coup de grace, the victims lose consciousness.