cking an Englishman on the head are so common a part of our Imperial
routine that the last dozen of them has not called forth as much pity as
can be counted on by any lady criminal. The judicial use of torture to
extort confession is supposed to be a relic of darker ages; but whilst
these pages are being written an English judge has sentenced a forger to
twenty years penal servitude with an open declaration that the sentence
will be carried out in full unless he confesses where he has hidden the
notes he forged. And no comment whatever is made, either on this or on
a telegram from the seat of war in Somaliland mentioning that certain
information has been given by a prisoner of war "under punishment." Even
if these reports are false, the fact that they are accepted without
protest as indicating a natural and proper course of public conduct
shews that we are still as ready to resort to torture as Bacon was. As
to vindictive cruelty, an incident in the South African war, when the
relatives and friends of a prisoner were forced to witness his
execution, betrayed a baseness of temper and character which hardly
leaves us the right to plume ourselves on our superiority to Edward III.
at the surrender of Calais. And the democratic American officer
indulges in torture in the Philippines just as the aristocratic English
officer did in South Africa. The incidents of the white invasion of
Africa in search of ivory, gold, diamonds, and sport, have proved that
the modern European is the same beast of prey that formerly marched to
the conquest of new worlds under Alexander, Antony, and Pizarro.
Parliaments and vestries are just what they were when Cromwell
suppressed them and Dickens derided them. The democratic politician
remains exactly as Plato described him; the physician is still the
credulous impostor and petulant scientific coxcomb whom Moliere
ridiculed; the schoolmaster remains at best a pedantic child farmer and
at worst a flagellomaniac; arbitrations are more dreaded by honest men
than lawsuits; the philanthropist is still a parasite on misery as the
doctor is on disease; the miracles of priestcraft are none the less
fraudulent and mischievous because they are now called scientific
experiments and conducted by professors; witchcraft, in the modern form
of patent medicines and prophylactic inoculations, is rampant; the
landowner who is no longer powerful enough to; set the mantrap of
Rhampsinitis improves on it by barbed