PUNISHMENT BY THE GANGUE.
In the administration of justice the same lax morality as in other branches of government exists, and bribery is largely resorted to by litigants, more especially in civil cases. As a rule money in excess of the legal fees has in the first instance to be paid to clerks and secretaries before a case can be put down for hearing, and a decision of the presiding mandarin is too often influenced by the sums of money which find their way into his purse from the pockets of either suitor. But the greatest blot on Chinese administration is the inhumanity shown to both culprits and witnesses in criminal procedure. Tortures of the most painful and revolting kind are used to extort evidence, and punishments scarcely more severely cruel are inflicted on the guilty parties. Flogging with bamboos, beating the jaws with thick pieces of leather, or the ankles with a stick, are some of the preliminary tortures applied to witnesses or culprits who refuse to give the evidence expected of them. Further refinements of cruelty are reserved for hardened offenders by means of which infinite pain and often permanent injury are inflicted.
FLOGGING A CULPRIT.
It follows as a natural consequence that in a country where torture is thus resorted to the punishments inflicted on criminals must be proportionately cruel. Death, the final punishment, can unfortunately be inflicted in various ways, and a sliding scale of capital punishments is used by the Chinese to mark their sense of the varying heinousness of murderous crimes. For parricide, matricide and wholesale murders, the usual sentence is that of Ling-che, or “ignominious and slow death.” In the carrying out of this sentence the culprit is fastened to a cross, and cuts varying in number, at the discretion of the judge, from eight to one hundred and twenty are made first on the face and fleshy parts of the body, next the heart is pierced, and finally when death has been thus caused, the limbs are separated from the body and divided. During a recent year ten cases in which this punishment was inflicted were reported in the official Peking Gazette. In ordinary cases of capital punishment execution by beheading is the common mode. This is a speedy and merciful death, the skill gained by frequent experience enabling the executioner in almost every case to perform his task with one blow. Another death which is less horrible to Chinamen, who view any mutilation of the body as an extreme disgrace, is by strangulation. The privilege of so passing out of the world is accorded at times to influential criminals, whose crimes are not of so heinous a nature as to demand their decapitation; and occasionally they are even allowed to be their own executioners.
Asiatics are almost invariably careless about the sufferings of others, and the men of China are no exception to the rule. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the horrors of a Chinese prison. The filth and dirt of the rooms, the brutality of the jailers, the miserable diet, and the entire absence of the commonest sanitary arrangements make a picture which is too horrible to draw in detail.
Chinese law-givers have distinguished very markedly between crimes accompanied and unaccompanied with violence. For offenses of the latter description, punishments of a comparatively light nature are inflicted, such as wearing a wooden collar, and piercing the ears with arrows, to the ends of which are attached slips of paper on which are inscribed the crime of which the culprit has been guilty. Frequently the criminals bearing these signs of their disgrace are paraded up and down the street where their offense was committed, and sometimes in more serious cases they are flogged through the leading thoroughfares of the city, preceded by a herald who announces the nature of their misdemeanors. But to give a list of Chinese punishments will be to exhaust the ingenuity of man to torture his fellow creatures. The subject is a horrible one and it is a relief to turn from the dingy prison gates and the halls of so-called justice.
After this review of the impersonal, and the material, and the official character of the Chinese empire as a nation, let us now turn to the more personal consideration of the people themselves, their characteristics, and their manner of life and thought.
OUTSIDE PEKING.
From a Sketch.