Decapitation is the mildest of Chinese extreme penalties, and is usually performed with much skill and sang-froid by means of a sword, the criminal, male and female, taking the matter most philosophically, and making no indecorous remonstrances at their summary taking off.
There is a tariff, too, for substitutes—a plan which might commend itself to our wealthier homicides. But our Celestial neighbours across the Pacific prefer killing the doomed by not allowing them to sleep, or starving them to death in cages or straightened limits, in which they are exhibited during the process of skeleton-formation, in peripatetic rambles on the shoulders of the local deputy sheriffs.
And chopping them deliberately into fragments, at intervals of an hour or so, is much to their taste. There is a cage, part of the spolia opima of the first Chinese war, among the archives of the Royal Artillery, at Madras, India, in which they carried about Colonel Rowlandson, and the London Times had a liberal annual payment on its pension list for the family of Mr. Bowles, a special correspondent, similarly disposed of just before the last Chinese war.
The torturing propensities of the pleasing red man, whom Cooper immortalised, and Custer has occasionally assisted to the happy hunting grounds, are too well known to require much notice.
The use of fire is a prominent feature in their social circles, complicated with the facetious tomahawk and the insinuating scalping-knife. But we know the Modocs, the Sioux, and others like them, only too well.
The Assyrians, Medes and Persians, ancient Egyptians, and other Orientals seemed to have employed similar agencies to their Israelitish neighbours for lopping off the rotten branches of their family trees.
The processes are faithfully depicted and chiselled on the walls of Thebes, Persepolis, and Nineveh.
The Greeks were somewhat tender-hearted in some cases; for instance, they allowed Socrates to poison himself comfortably among his friends.
They objected to parricides, however, and for them reserved a punishment adopted from the Egyptians, like their alphabet, and naturalised at a later date by the Romans. They confined the too impetuous slayer of his father in a bag with a snake, a monkey, and a cat, to keep him company, and then gently dropped the congenial party into the sea.
The Romans seem first to have hit on the idea of crucifixion, a singularly torturing refinement of internal, external, and mental pain.