The Sun.
London, England, 1849-12-29 00:00:00

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LONDON, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 29, 1849.

Divers cruel and ignominious punishments have,
from time to time, been abolished—the rapidity of
their abolition being proportioned to the humanising
progress of civilization. Thus, the farther a nation
becomes removed from the days of barbarism, the
less are its laws characterised by harshness and fero-
city. Thanks to the beneficent permission of the
DIVINITY, and to the lovely influences of Religion,
the statute-books of a land like England are no longer
tarnished by those savage and sanguinary evidences
of power which are compatible only with an ignorant
despotism, and would be wholly incongruous if ad-
mitted as a part of the constitution of an enlightened
commonwealth. Catapults and battering-rams are
happily not more obsolete, as weapons of warfare,
than the rack or the scavenger's daughter, as instru-
ments of criminal correction. The sling and the
crossbow have fortunately been not more entirely
abandoned, as military projectiles, than the wheel
and the thumbscrew as vehicles for the infliction of
torture. Even where the brutal decrees of a preced-
ing age have, through a sentiment of contemptuous
indifference, been retained upon the records of the
Legislature, as in the ordinations relating to the
highest crimes cognizable by the State, the heinous
crimes of leze majeste, the execrable sternness of
those decrees is, nevertheless, virtually paralysed
and impotent. The dregs of society may
still, it is true, be vomitted forth at
intervals from the moral cloaca of the
metropolis to exult in the contortions of a strangled
assassin, but the ruffianism of the community can no
longer feast upon the agonies of an embewelled
traitor, or listen with fiendish satisfaction to the
shrieks of some wretch expiring at the in the
midst of the blazing faggots heaped together by the
fangs of fanaticism. The bowstring and the basti-
nado, the gridiron and the cauldron of boiling oil,
the cucking-stool and the spiked collars have gra-
dually fallen into desuetude as the guardians of politi-
cal authority, and survive only as among the para-
phernalia decorating the more sombre recesses of
medieval romance. Men have at length recognised
that bloodthirstiness is not more detestable in the
governed than in the governor, in the insulated
unit of the population than in the government which
is the representative of the population in the aggre_.
gate; and hence it has come to pass that ears are no
longer nailed to the pillory at Charing-cross, that
noses are no longer split open to the bone on the
scaffold at Tower hill, that the smoke and stench of
auto• da-fes no longer poison the atmosphere of Smith-
field, and that the felon, according to the poetical
patter of JERRY JUNIPER, is no longer applauded as
" A merchant of capers gay "

as he dangles from the noose, dancing the dance of
death under the crossbeams at Tyburn. We have
grown less bluff and stalwart, it may be, as a people,
but we have grown, at the same time, more humane
and forgiving.
While congratulating ourselves upon the gentleness
infused into the laws of England, we still have
lamentable reason to bewail the perpetration of much
cruelty in various professions and in numerous sec-
tions of the community. So long as the triangle is
capable of being erected in the vicinity of the camp
or the barrack, so long as the lash is permitted to
descend upon the shoulders of our seamen, upon those
backs which have never yet turned towards the foes

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