THE CHAIR OF LITTLE EASE
NOT many years ago, as I remember, a deal of deprecatory talk was in evolution about a certain Governor of a Persian province, who was said to have been boiled alive by order of the Shah. Our shouting and shrilling in this matter were not altogether becoming, considering whose progeny we are. It is not so very long since all the nations of Europe practised boiling alive—commonly in oil, which was thought to impart a fine discomfort to the person so unlucky as to be in the cauldron. In England boiling was the legal punishment for poisoners for a long time, beginning in 1531, in the reign of Henry VII. Among those who suffered this discomfort was a man mentioned in the chronicle of the Grey Friars, who was let down into the kettle by a chain until he was done. He, however, was not boiled in oil—just plain. Some of the items of an expense account relating to the execution of Friar Stone at Canterbury are interesting in their homely way:
Paid 2 men that sat by the kettle and parboiled him1s
To 3 men that carried his quarters to the gates and set them up1s
For a woman that scoured the kettle2d
With regard to that last item one cannot repress the flame of a consuming curiosity to know if the scouring was done before or afterward. If afterward, the poor woman seems to have been miserably underpaid.
But call it a long time ago, protesting that the tendency to boil one another has exhausted its impetus, or, if you please, worked itself out of our clarifying blood. But the year 1790 is not so far back, and burning at the stake probably generates an uneasiness to which that of the oil-boiled gentry of the earlier period was nowise superior. It was in the year mentioned—in the reign of his most gracious Majesty George, the third of that name—that burning at the stake ceased to be the legal penalty for “coining,” which was accounted “treason,” and murder of a husband, which was “petty treason.” But wife-killers and coiners, male, were hanged. The last woman burned alive departed this life, I think, in 1789. Men are living to-day whose fathers were living then and may, as children, have played in the ashes.
Still (it may be urged) it was not actually we who did it: in our milder day we have neither the cauldron nor the stake. Ah, but we have the dynamo. We have the custom of putting a small percentage of our assassins into an “electrical chair” and doing them to death by pressing a button—a process to which in defiance of two languages we have given the name “electrocution.” For encouragement of the rising young assassin, physicians assure us that this gives a painless death.
The physicians know nothing about it; for anything they know to the contrary, death by electricity may be the most frightful torment that it is possible for any of nature’s forces or processes to produce. The agony may be not only inconceivably great, but to the sufferer it may seem to endure for a period inconceivably long. That many of the familiar physical indications of suffering are absent (though “long, shuddering sighs” and “straining at the straps” are not certainly symptoms of joy) is very little to the purpose when we know that electricity paralyzes the muscles by whose action pain is familiarly manifested. We know that it paralyzes all the seats of sensation, for that matter, and puts an end to possibilities of pain. That is only to say that it kills. But by what secret and infernal pang may not all this be accompanied or accomplished? Through what unnatural exaltation of the senses may not the moment of its accomplishing be commuted into unthinkable cycles of time? Of all this the physicians can have no more knowledge than so many toads under stones.