“I was frequently jeered at,” he said, “at first; but I put it down to people’s ignorance, and now I am received with the greatest kindness wherever my services are needed.”
“How does it affect you in your own town?” was the last question I put to Mr. Marwood.
“Oh!” he replied, “at Horncastle I was looked upon as one of the first men in the place. I was treated well by one and all. Detesting idleness, I passed my vacant time in business; and worked in my shoe-shop near the church day after day, until such time as I was required elsewhere. It would have been better for those I executed if they had preferred industry to idleness.”
I had passed nearly two hours in the society of the hangman when our quiet chat was over, thanked him for his kindness, and bade him adieu. As I left the room he shook me heartily by the hand, then said, “Good-bye, God bless you,” and bowed me out of the villa with that polished courtesy which is always so becoming in a Crown official.
CHAPTER CLXXIV.
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT—MERCIFUL AND MERCILESS MODES IN DIFFERENT AGES.
In this chapter we propose giving a short review of the methods by which obnoxious criminals have been, at various times, among various peoples, invited to “shuffle off this mortal coil.”
Capital punishment, like Cleopatra’s charms, has been of “infinite variety”—the variety, however, as a rule, being simply among the most horrible possible methods. No records remain to tell how the contemporaries of the Saurians and the Megatherium, the ingenious dwellers in caves, and warriors of the flint age, disposed of their malefactors, but the fullest accounts have been preserved of the proceedings of our more modern ancestors, since the days of Adam, in the way of executions.
The Jews, who led the bead-roll of antique nations, appear to have usually stoned the criminals of their own race—a democratic sort of penalty, where every good citizen had a finger in the pie, and hurled his righteous rock, and even the little Hebrew boys could enjoy the fun of the stoner. To the stoned it must have been something of a lingering torture, requiring much patience to bear. For their enemies they reserved the sharper practice of hewing them in pieces, or they burned them alive, or turned them to agricultural account, and fertilised the sites of their smoking cities by harrowing them in with considerable vehemence.
The Chinese, another ancient and highly cultured race, have been similarly merciless. It is singular how little difference there has been in this respect of ingenious cruelty between the most cultivated peoples and the wildest savages.