flesh, which he cuts in pieces with his knife. The first pluck is not to deprive her of life: this, indeed, would cost the sanguinary minister of legal vengeance his own. But on the completion of the number prescribed, he is privileged to give his miserable victim the coup de grace.*

In the same manner the Chinese punish persons convicted of rebellion against paternal authority. This will excite little surprise in those, who are acquainted with the respect paid in that country to a father or a husband. These characters exercise a complete sovereignty in their families, and under the regulations of a government friendly to morals, the conjugal and the paternal relations possess their majesty as well as the throne.

Let us hasten to rid ourselves of these horrible inflictions, worthy only of the crowned monsters who governed Rome. Caligula may have delivered a senator to the mob to be stabbed and torn in pieces, and may have glutted his malignity by viewing his limbs and his entrails dragged through the streets and brought to his feet! Finding meat too dear to feed with it the wild beasts reserved for his shows, he may have ordered criminals, selected by himself for the purpose, to be thrown alive to them for their support! What atrocity, indeed, can astonish us in the conduct of a prince, who ordered the executioners to proceed slowly, that the sufferers might feel themselves die; who bragged, that he had not only islands for banishment, but swords for slaughter; who directed infirm old men to be thrown to wild beasts; who caused a sick man to be bled to death, saying 'bleeding would cure him ;' who every tenth day made out a list of victims for the scaffold, calling it 'the settling of his accounts;' who, in fine, in the bitterness of regret that he could not destroy the whole of his subjects at a single blow, exclaimed; 'Would to God the Roman people had but one head!'

* Parallele de Zoroastre, Confucius, et Mahomet, II. 2.

IX.

OF THE PUNISHMENT OF BURNING.

THE punishment of burning has been inflicted by several communities. Examples of it frequently occur in the early ages of the French monarchy. It was enacted at Rome, by the code of the Twelve Tables, against incendiaries.* But no where was it adopted with so many variations, as among the Babylonians and the Hebrews. At Babylon," a burning fiery furnace," was sometimes prepared for the purpose, as in the instance of the young Jews who refused to worship the image of Nebuchadnezzar.+ Sometimes the criminal was "roasted in the fire," as Ahab, son of Kolaiah. In Judea, boiling caldrons, § boughs of trees formed into a funeral-pile, and melted lead poured into the mouth, which was forced open by partial strangulation, were upon different occasions introduced.

In France, the convict wearing a shirt dipped in sulphur is bound with an iron chain to a stake. This is the most rigorous of all the ordinary punishments: and yet, though inflicted in cases of witchcraft, sacrilege, blasphemy, and heresy, it is not extended to the more heinous crime of parricide.

It cannot be necessary for me to add that, even admitting capital punishment to continue, this mode of it ought to be abolished. The same remark applies to breaking on the wheel.

* Persons, as the name principally imports, guilty of the erime by us denominated arson.'

+ Dan. iii. 12, &c.

Jerem. xxix. 21, 22.

S2 Macc. vii. 3.

.X.

OF THE PUNISHMENT OF BREAKING ON THE WHEEL.

It is of little moment to us to ascertain, whether this punishment was first inflicted under Commodus in the second century of Christianity, or at a far later period by Louis le Gros, upon the assassins of the Earl of Hauder; or (lastly) by the Emperor Albert, in his war with the Swiss at the beginning of the fourteenth century, on Rodolph of Warth, who had made an attempt upon his life. It was confessedly not admitted into the French code before the A reign of Francis I., and it would be satisfactory to be able to impute to the chancellor Poyet an idea so worthy of his malignity. But the edict is dated Feb. 4, 1534.*

This edict was marked not less by it's disproportion of punishments, than by it's general spirit of atrocity. Hanging had been the penalty of murder, and so it remained. The wheel was not extended to this crime, but confined to cases of highway-robbery and burglary. Thus property was more carefully protected than life. This shocking disparity was finally corrected under the the reign of Henry II.†

Two modes of effecting this correction offered themselves; either to be satisfied with hanging the highwayman (a punishment, even so, far too heavy for the offence) or to break the murderer upon the wheel. The first would have been the milder mode : the latter was adopted. The highwayman no longer appeared a greater criminal than the murderer, but he was still equally punished. And hence all the writers on criminal law place on the same line, both as to punishment and heinousness, highwayrobbery and parricide.

* The insertion of it, encumbered as it is with circuitous terms of French law, and a statement of the inadequacy of preceding punishments, was thought

unnecessary.

+ By an edict, dated July 1547.

And yet the law, thus severe in instances of individual robbery, contents itself with inflicting merely pecuniary fines upon ministers who embezzle the public property: a crime, which in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was punished with death. For we read that Enguerrant de Marigny, superintendent of the finances to Philip le Bel, was capitally convicted of peculation, and suffered for it under Louis le Hutin. Nor would Jacques Cœur have been more fortunate under Charles VII., had not that prince commuted his punishment for a fine of 300,000 livres, and the confiscation of his entire property.* This rigour was confirmed by many other statutes. In 1716,+ Louis XV. substituted pecuniary mulcts. Well may we exclaim with Cato: "The private robber spends his life in chains (or rather, dies for his transgression); the public plunderer glitters in gold and purple.‡

The wheel is avowedly so barbarous an instrument, that the judges almost invariably, by an implied permission, direct the criminal to be strangled, before he is placed upon it.

XI.

OF THE PUNISHMENT OF BEHEADING.

To respect, even in the infliction of punishment, the rank of the offender, was the error of the most celebrated states: and, instead of correcting it, modern times have given it extension and encouragement.

The civil distinction, made at Rome between the citizen and the slave, naturally involved a distinction in their punishments: but in France, where no slaves exist, can it be proper, by a

* Decree of Parliament, dated May 19, 1453.

+ Declaration, dated Sept. 18.

‡ Fures privatorum furtorum in nervo atque compedibus ætatem agunt; fures publici in auro atque purpurâ. (A. Gell. II. 18.)

marked difference in the operations of the law, to insult a large majority of the nation?* Is not this to revive, or to consecrate, the principles of villenage and feudality?

In defence of this diversity of punishments, it has been said: "You are deceived by appearances. The equality of suffering consists more in the ignominy, than in the actual pang; and the criminal of higher extraction, by undergoing the same infliction, would endure a heavier punishment than his inferior." This view of the subject may, at the first glance, "give us pause:” but, when we come to consider it more accurately, we can regard it only as a blasphemy against reason and humanity; the more so, as it seeks to divest beheading of the disgrace, which is not less necessary than corporal suffering to the punishment of delinquency. A capital punishment, not involving shame, is a monster in the code of penalties. The author of Philosophical, Political, and Moral Legislation+ speaks of a person, who established his claim to nobility by the fact, that his grandfather had suffered decapitation! What a title, to be substantiated by a judicial sentence of death!

Privileges in suffering! A privileged punishment! In China, all this is reversed.-The great man is strangled, the humbler offender is beheaded. With this agreed the notion of the Jews: beheading was, with them, the most ignominious of punishments;§ and was therefore never inflicted upon criminals of their own natin, but reserved for 'the proselytes of the gate.' To the Greeks it was wholly unknown. That people always imposed the same

* In some provinces (in Alsace, for instance) all classes of offenders are promiscuously beheaded.

† II. i.

Le Comte, Lr. ix.

§ Moses considered as a Legislator and as a Moralist, v.ii,

I contend that it was wholly unknown to the Greeks, though some writers have ascribed the invention of it to that people. Were that, however, the case, as it also existed among the Hebrews, and is mentioned in our Scriptures, it is more probable that we derived it from the latter.