652 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The dangerous privilege of using these " methods for the dis- 

 covery of truth " was greatly abused, and often carried to a fatal 

 extreme. Through ages of unrecorded tyranny the party in 

 power put down its enemies and all opposing thought by such un- 

 bridled cruelty as no one now cares to contemplate. The public 

 conscience seemed to approve the principle of torture as a divine 

 prerogative of kings. Barons, judges, priests in brief, all great 

 robbers and politicians cherished it. The more humane mon- 

 archs, such as the Empress Theresa, could only limit its cruelties 

 by precise and moderate safeguards, exempting from all torture 

 the sick and feeble, the old men, pregnant women, young chil- 

 dren, and weak-minded, and providing that medical and surgical 

 skill be always at hand to restore those who are near death, and 

 reduce dislocations or fractures. 



In some of the histories and cyclopaedias are misleading state- 

 ments that torture was abolished from the Austrian dominions 

 about the middle of the last century, whereas this Austrian code 

 was promulgated nineteen years later. Again, it is recorded of 

 Maria Theresa, after an account of her general European war of 

 seven years, ending in 1748, that " she now turned her attention 

 to the internal affairs of her states. She introduced numerous re- 

 forms, alleviated the burdens of the peasantry, abolished torture, 

 and promoted industry/* Her code, however, proves otherwise ; 

 for she had reigned twenty-one years after the peace of 1748 when 

 she re-enacted these laws to perpetuate these terrible outrages on 

 human justice. Whether she abolished it at all in the remaining 

 ten years of her life is open to doubt. Other statements from 

 the same sources, regarding the continuance and decline of the 

 Holy Inquisition, appear equally questionable. 



The study of such customs suggests strange and difficult ques- 

 tions. What sort of minds had those people ? Did they possess 

 conscience ? If so, was it anything like the conscience of the 

 moderns, who cherish the same sacred books ? Was human jus- 

 tice then a false moral guide ? Is it a true one now ? Is human 

 nature the same from age to age, or can it reverse itself while 

 standing on the same basis ? Was the woman-heart tender and 

 sympathetic in those days ? Or what sort of women reared the 

 monsters who kept up torture for twenty centuries ? 



The persistence of that legal crime, in spite of all the morals, 

 philosophies, and religions that held sway through those ages, is 

 a hard and stubborn fact. Its phenomena seem to fit no favorite 

 theory of general progress. What a world of intellectual power, 

 of tender morality, of spiritual zeal, has blazed as with heavenly 

 fire through those ages of unjust torment, without taking any con- 

 cern in that system ! It stood forth above all such influences like 

 an upheaval of archaic rock which all the tides and storms of 



