The combat with crime is as old as civilization. Unceasing warfare is and ever has been waged between the law-maker and the law-breaker. The punishments inflicted upon criminals have been as various as the nations devising them, and have reflected with singular fidelity their temperaments or development. This is true of the death penalty which in many ages was the only recognized punishment for crimes either great or small. Each nation has had its own special method of inflicting it. One was satisfied simply to destroy life; another sought to intensify the natural fear of death by the added horrors of starvation or the withholding of fluid, by drowning, stoning, impaling or by exposing the wretched victims to the stings of insects or snakes. Burning at the stake was the favourite method of religious fanaticism. This flourished under the Inquisition everywhere, but notably in Spain where hecatombs perished by the autos-da-fÉ or "trials of faith" conducted with great ceremony often in the presence of the sovereign himself. Indeed, so terrible are the records of the ages that one turns with relief to the more humane methods of slowly advancing civilization,—the electric chair, the rope, the garotte, and even to that sanguinary "daughter of the Revolution," "la guillotine," the timely and merciful invention of Dr. Guillotin which substituted its swift and certain action for the barbarous hacking of blunt swords in the hands of brutal or unskilful executioners.

Savage instinct, however, could not find full satisfaction even in cruel and violent death, but perforce must glut itself in preliminary tortures. Mankind has exhausted its fiendish ingenuity in the invention of hideous instruments for prolonging the sufferings of its victims. When we read to-day of the cold-blooded Chinese who condemns his criminal to be buried to the chin and left to be teased to death by flies; of the lust for blood of the Russian soldier who in brutal glee impales on his bayonet the writhing forms of captive children; of the recently revealed torture-chambers of the Yildiz Kiosk where Abdul Hamid wreaked his vengeance or squeezed millions of treasure from luckless foes; or of the Congo slave wounded and maimed to satisfy the greed for gold of an unscrupulous monarch;—we are inclined to think of them as savage survivals in "Darkest Africa" or in countries yet beyond the pale of western civilization. Yet it was only a few centuries ago that Spain "did to death" by unspeakable cruelties the gentle races of Mexico and Peru, and sapped her own splendid vitality in the woeful chambers of the Inquisition. Even as late as the end of the eighteenth century enlightened France was filling with the noblest and best of her land those oubliettes of which the very names are epitomes of woe: La Fin d'Aise, "The End of Ease;" La Boucherie, "The Shambles;" and La Fosse, "The Pit" or "Grave;" in the foul depths of which the victim stood waist deep in water unable to rest or sleep without drowning. Buoyed up by hope of release, some endured this torture of "La Fosse" for fifteen days; but that was nature's limit. None ever survived it longer.

The oubliettes of the Conciergerie, recently revealed by excavations below the level of the Seine, vividly confirm the story of Masers de Latude, long confined in a similar one in BicÊtre. He says: "I had neither fire nor artificial light and prison rags were my only clothing. To quench my thirst, I sucked morsels of ice broken off from the open window; I was nearly choked by the effluvium from the cellars. Insects stung me in the eyes. I had nearly always a bad taste in my mouth, and my lungs were horribly oppressed. I endured unceasing pangs of hunger, cold and damp; I was attacked by scurvy; in ten days my legs and thighs were swollen to twice their ordinary size; my body turned black; my teeth loosened in their sockets so that I could not masticate; I could not speak and was thought to be dead."

Perhaps the refinement of torture, however, had been reached under the cowardly and superstitious Louis XI, whose iron cages were of such shape and size that the prisoners could languish in them for years unable either to stand upright or to stretch full length upon the floor. One feels the grim humour of fate that condemned the Bishop of Verdun, their inventor, to be the first to suffer in them.

Life-long confinement under such conditions was the so-called "clemency" of rulers desiring to be thought merciful. Supported first by hope, then deadened by despair, men endured life in these prisons for years only to leave them bereft of health or reason. The famous names of those who languished in them is legion. Fouquet, the defaulting minister of Louis XIV, whose magnificence had rivalled that of the king himself, was punished by such captivity for twenty years. The "Man with the Iron Mask," whose identity, lost for three centuries, has been proved beyond a doubt after careful comparison of all theories,—pined his life away in one of them, accused, like Dreyfus, of having sold a secret of state.

Records of like cruelty and indifference to human suffering blackened the pages of English history until the merciful ministrations of John Howard and of Elizabeth Frye aroused the slumbering pity of Great Britain, and alleviated the conditions of prisoners all over the world.

In all lands, in all ages, in all stages of civilization, man has left grim records of vengeful passion. No race has escaped the stigma, perhaps no creed. It would almost seem that nations had vied with each other in the subtlety of their ingenuity for producing suffering. The stoical Indian, the inscrutable Chinese, the cruel Turk, the brutal Slav, the philosophic Greek, the suave and artistic Italian, the stolid German, the logical and pleasure-loving French, the aggressive English,—all have left their individual seal on these records of "man's inhumanity to man."

From the gloom of these old prisons have sprung many of the most fascinating stories of the world,—stories so dramatic, so thrilling, so pathetic that even the magic fiction of Dickens or Dumas pales beside the dread realities of the Tower, the Bastile, the Spielberg, the "leads" of the Palace of the Doges, the mines of Siberia, or the Black Hole of Calcutta.

What heroic visions history conjures for us! Columbus languishing in chains in Spain; Savonarola and Jean d'Arc passing from torture to the stake; Sir William Wallace, Sidney, Raleigh, Lady Jane Grey, Sir Thomas More, irradiating the dim cells of London's Tower; Madame Roland, Charlotte Corday, Marie Antoinette, beautifying the foul recesses of the Conciergerie; gentle Madame Elizabeth soothing the sorrows of the Temple; Silvio Pellico in the Spielberg; Settembrini and the Patriots of the Risorgimento in the prisons of Italy; the myriad martyrs of Russia in the dungeons of the Czar or the wilds of Siberia—all pass before us in those magic pages, uttering in many tongues but in one accord their righteous and eternal protest against the blind vengeance of man.