Note 69 — Chapter V

So anxious has our Legislature ever been to establish mercy even to convicted offenders, as a fundamental principle of government, that they made it an express article of that great public compact framed at the era of the Revolution—the Bill of Rights—that “no cruel and unusual punishments” should ever be enforced (see Bill of Rights, art. x.). They even added a clause for that purpose to the oath which kings and queens were thenceforward to take at their coronation, thus endeavouring to render it an everlasting obligation to English monarchs to make justice “to be executed with mercy.” In the same spirit they availed themselves, not only of the crisis of the Revolution, but of every important occasion, to procure new confirmations to be given to the right of trial by jury, and in general to the purity and integrity of our system of criminal jurisprudence. A curious debate took place in Parliament in 1605 (see Parliamentary Hist., vol. v.) on a proposal to introduce some unusual form of punishment for certain criminals. The motion was very speedily rejected. I find in some ancient books on law, that even in the execution of the “peines fortes et dures,” regard was to be had to decency. A harrowing narrative of bodily pains, inflicted in order to urge the victim to confession, ends with the injunction to stop short of personal indecency towards him or her; this last agony was seldom inflicted, and only under the most oppressive tyranny, and by a cruel and shameless executive. It is impossible to dwell further on this subject; nor can one read such records without a burning shame on account of the degeneracy in this particular of our own times. It will be a sad day for Her Majesty when she wakes up to the full knowledge of the fact that she—a woman, a gracious and virtuous woman—has signed away with her own hand the liberties of a vast multitude of her subjects in a more complete fashion than has been attempted since the days of the Stuarts, and that she has unwittingly sanctioned deeds which make the heart of womanhood to freeze with horror.