THE EUROPEAN LAW OF TORTURE. 653 



progress had been powerless to beat down. Grecian culture and 

 beauty did not care to assuage one pain. The magnanimity of 

 Roman power did not hold out one merciful reform toward the 

 suspected offender. Cicero wrote against the system, but all in 

 vain. 



The young nobility and students of Europe, nocking to great 

 universities like Salerno in the middle ages, and learning from 

 imported Arabic professors from milder Asia, do not seem to 

 have acquired any noble horror of human cruelty. New reli- 

 gious sects arose and competed for public favor, but all were more 

 ready to use torture than to condemn it. The leading minds of 

 Europe were full of the New Testament, but they did not find 

 legal torture referred to therein. Only the command not to suffer 

 a witch to live seemed to fit the case. 



A theory is greatly needed to harmonize these incongruous 

 facts a bright, clear, comprehensive, optimistic theory, credit- 

 able alike to humanity and the forces which guide human devel- 

 opment. But such an explanation is not readily found. In de- 

 fault of a broad and able-bodied theory, fitted to carry us over all 

 difficulties, one is left floundering among some unpleasant reflec- 

 tions. All races may have risen from barbarism. Before bar- 

 barism they may just possibly have come up from a still more 

 brutish state. Yet this instinct of enjoying the torture of others 

 can hardly be called a survival of brutishness, since animals do 

 not seem to consciously practice cruelty; it is rather a distin- 

 guishing trait of mankind. 



This element of savagery is a most persistent and incorrigible 

 offender in the happy family of our virtues. How it has defied 

 culture, development, moral training ! In theory all advancing 

 races should properly have this Canada thistle of our moral field 

 pretty well eradicated by this time by the strong hand of social 

 and religious development. But when it has been well dug out, 

 burned up, and killed very dead, the weary reformer, resting on 

 his hoe, sees the thorny shoots of human cruelty here and there 

 pushing boldly up in new places, fresh from the ancient seeds of 

 inherited brutality that still lurk in the soil. Yet he cheerfully 

 begins anew, and attacks the inexhaustible evil with never-tiring 

 zeal. 



It is also depressing to reflect that all men have been savages 

 in infancy ; that children pass through the ascending grades of 

 mere animal life ; that each young pupil, rightly observed, has 

 been a sample of slow or rapid evolution through the stages of 

 cave-dweller, nomad, and barbarian, to the half-civilized or even 

 a higher grade. The childhood of races reflects the development 

 of individuals. In the rapid march of the infant mind there 

 comes a time when it gives pleasure to see and produce suffering. 



