Another method of painless extinction is by blowing the patient from a gun. This was invented by the Mahommedans of India, was employed by the British during the mutiny of 1857, and is still in favour with the Ameer of Afghanistan.
It has one great advantage as a preventive of crime in its application to Hindoos, as they believe, when a man’s body is split into filaments, as it must be by such a process, that his chances of future existence are very slim.
Their ideas of resurrection are peculiar and Pythagorean, but they object to this total obliteration, and accordingly dread the blowing-from-gun procedure above all other penalties. Physically, it cannot hurt, however.
The conclusion and distribution of the fragments are so sudden and complete that pain must be entirely wanting as an element. Destroying a hanged Brahmin’s body with quicklime is also objectionable to Hindoos, on account of similar doubts as to his future rehabilitation.
A Hindoo punishment, of gradually crushing a criminal under the foot of a trained elephant, is repulsive, and is discountenanced by the British Government. Any rajah who reverts to these ancestral amusements renders his tenure on the throne insecure. It has not been practised for some years.
The guillotine, of which such horrible use was made in the past French Revolution, has been said to be the most merciful mode of putting malefactors to death, but this is by no means certain.
Dr. Tuc and some German physicians and surgeons after him held that there does indubitably remain in the brain of a decapitated head some degree (un reste) of thought, and in the nerves something of sensibility, and the case of Mademoiselle Corday was alleged as proving that doctrine.
We abstain from any details of the thousands of murders by the guillotine at this time. One fact will enable our readers to understand something of its horrors.
It was proved on the trial of Fouquier Tinville that 160 persons of all ages and ranks, and of both sexes, were tried and executed on a charge of conspiracy, not merely false but absurd, visionary, and impossible—forty-five of these persons, who were utterly unknown to each other, were tried and condemned within twenty minutes, and executed on the same evening in almost as short a space. These executions were for many months the amusement—the spectacle of the people—we wish we could say the populace of Paris. Chairs were stationed round the instrument of death, where women, in a station of life to be able to pay for that amusement, used to have seats, and sit, and chat, and work, while waiting for the tragedy, which they had looked at as a farce. We find in the Revue Retrospective a curious letter incidentally descriptive of this elegant scene of Parisian amusement.
“The Procureur-Général Rœderer to Citizen Guidon.