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Show FROM STAKETO LEVER. The Changes in American Modes of Execution -An Interesting ' : Evolution. ! INDIAN WAYS OF EXECUTION. The Savages Were Ingenious as Devisers ; of Torture-Lawless Hangings ""Electrocution. N no department of life has human ingenuity been exerted more than in its horrible endeavors to retiue cruelty and invest deatli with fear and pain. It is only of late years that science has been called hi, not merely to provide a new method of execution, but to settle once for all what is the method niost rapid, certain and merciful, bin. den death may be inflicted in a glaringly corrupt and t hie ves, pickpockets, incendiaries ami assassins numbered their victims by hundreds. In this condition of attain the well disposed citizens determined deter-mined to become. law unto themselves, and the most influential men organized an association looking to this end. The flrst and one of the most exciting of the cases growing out of this extraordinary organization occurred in June of that year (1S51). A Sydney convict was cuight in the act of carrying away a small safe which hs had stolen. The man, a desperate character, charac-ter, was seized by some members of the vigilance committee, who conducted hira to their headquarters, where he was tried in the presence of about eiehty members of the association, sitting with closed doors, convicted and sentenced to be hung iu Portsmouth square that night. During the progress of the trial the citizens had assembled in large numbers about the building, the bell of the engine house having hav-ing rung the pre-arranged signal to give notice of the proceedings. Though much excited, the populace were not disorderly. As soon as the sentence was passed the bell again began to toll, but this time it was the funeral knell of the wretched man. This was at just Rfter midnight. The captain of the police force demanded the prisoner, but quickly saw it was of no use to attempt a rescue. Some person climbed the liberty pole to rig a block for the execution, exe-cution, but a loud shout, "Don't haug him on the liberty pole!" arose from all quarters. quar-ters. Voices screamed out, "To the old adobe!" and a rush was made for that building, on the corner of the square. At the end of the building a block was rigged and a long rope run through It. In the meantime the prisoner was closely surrounded sur-rounded by an armed and resolute body of men. A noose was thrown over his head, , IE, I ul imi TOBTUBING A PRISONER hundred ways, many of them more rapid than the noose. Shooting, if the heart or brain is pierced, is one of them. The guillotine guil-lotine and garrote are swifter than the hangman. Quick poisons have been administered ad-ministered during sleep. And now the electricians claim that the electric fluid moves more speedily than sensation, a view borne out as far as such views can be by the testimony of those who have received and survived a stroke of lightning. Any one of these methods would therefore be satisfactory so far as suddenness and the absence of any approach to torture is concerned. con-cerned. . In old times, however, death was made terrible by preliminary torture. The victim vic-tim was crucified, or stretched upon the rack; horses pulled the limbs from the body; the French devised iron rings that were passed around the legs or body, wooden wedges then being driven between them and the flesh until the bones and muscles were reduced to jelly; Sir William Will-iam Skevington invented an instrument that became known as "Skevington's Daughter," which which so compressed the frame as to start the blood from the nostrils and from the hands and feet; a prisoner's cell was constructed, the walls of which slowly closed around the culprit day by day, until finally they crushed him to death; the body was anointed with honey in order to attract insects. Persons were suspended by weights to trees, or fastened to the limbs of trees which were forced into proximity and then permitted to fly apart; molten lead was poured into the cars and the body immersed in boiling oil; men were buried to the neck in the earth and left to die by slow degrees; and so until within the last 800 years the record rec-ord of European cruelty in the infliction of the death penalty is replete with harrowing har-rowing details. A LEGAL EXECCTIOV. the rope manned by twenty ready hands who ran backward, "raiding the wretched man swiftly to the beam, where a few struggles and a quiver of the hempen cord told th crowd that their terrible vengeance ven-geance had been executed. At 0 o'clock the city marshal cut down the body and consigned it to the dead house. Only a month elapsed from this time when another and similar scene was enacted. en-acted. The criminal was one of a gang of thieves and murderers, and was convicted on his own confession. Other executions followed in San Frhncisco and elsewhere in California, until at last a complete renovation reno-vation of society took place and quiet and order were restored. A frontier lynching may be marked with less -formality than that which has been described, a box or a I wagon beneath the convenient limb of a tree constituting the scaffold and a score or more of brown faced, resolute men the self appointed executioners, but tho end is the same, and the social atmosphere is purer afterward. Nowadays a strictly legal execution is conducted in privacy and with decorum. The culprit has been the recipient of flowers flow-ers from sympathetic women, fed on the dainties of his choice, provided at public expense with a new suit of clothes, shrived by a priest, probably filled with whisky to deaden his sensibilities, and marches forth from his cell totue gallows In the jail yard at the head of a procession ot sheriff's deputies, dep-uties, the hero of tho hour. To the very last moment his going off is made as comfortable com-fortable as the circumstances will permit, and when all is over the multitude gather around his rosewood coffin at the undertaker's under-taker's establishment to glut thcircuriosity and criticise the latest victim of the law. What will be the ultimate effect of executions exe-cutions by electricity hereafter in the manner man-ner ordered by the New York law? Tho prisoner, hurried by the jailer perhaps at an hour least expected from the cell to the silence of tho death chamber, strapped in tho fatal chair, coufrouted by hlf a dozen grave men, one of whom he knows is to pull the terrible lever that may not instantly in-stantly send him into eternity, but singe and tear and distort, his frame; with the knowledge that in a few hours afterward his body will be festering in quicklime, that no reporters will be present to describe to the public whether he died like a brave man or a coward, and thus not permit a e&5k MX gig PULLISG TUK FATAIv LEVEH. consoling thonght to the boon companions he has left behind-what will be the result of all this mystery and influence upon the criminal classes may not be determined for a long time, bnt it is to be hoped that the new method of inflicting the death penalty will prove satisfactory to the philanthropists phil-anthropists who have been Instrumental in securing the change, and spare the public from the contemplation of the brutal scenes hat are now not infrequent around the scaffold. A FRONTIER LYNCHING. France still employs the guillotine, Spun the garrote, Turkey the bowstring and sack. Japan graciously allows her gentlemen to commit hara-kiri. In China they behead and strangle each other; in Siam and some other oriental countries elephants tread the culprits to death, and only a few years ago civilized England blew Insurgent Sepoys from the mouths of cannon. The first execution by hanging took place in 1341, the method being imported into Spain from Morocco and Arabia. . In America we thus far know only the noose, and it will probably remain the accomplice of the executioner task until it has been demonstrated beyond the possibility pos-sibility of doubt that science, with the electrical chair and deadly current, has provided a quicker, more effective and merciful means of egress from this mundane mun-dane sphere than we now possess. Until a few years ago the American Indian In-dian took the lead in pure, unadulterated deviltry of invention in the art of tating human life with the least dispatch and of perpetuating the system of cruelties that characterized the Dark Ages James Fen-nimore Fen-nimore Cooper in his novels describes with ho rrible detail many of these savage tragedies trage-dies and they arenot all a matter of legend. Old frontiersmen and scouts are still living who bear personal witness to the death of comrades at the stake, or by flaying alive or dismemberment. Perhaps they have themselves 'run the gantlet, and been belwnTcut and tomahawked by young brtv" preparatory to the final sacrifice yet have escaped by fleetness of foot to tell the tale. To be taken a V dian means, first, torture, then death, or a captivity worse than death. The remains of those who fell with Custer on the Rose-bd Rose-bd aU mutilated and hacked to pieces by Sish women and children sent .thrill ofhorror through the civilized world and made men realize for once the force of the g that "the only good Indiansarethe d Fortuly an end has come to this savage sav-age butchery? though "' UwT soTreUtlT the resort of an n?wquiokly follows the commission of method has ''mbm when less pSnesTwould have been X avaU C n emple the work o fhe vSlance committed in Californ.a in $Tltf iormatio.. wa excusable an public necessity. Society was on-sSXcrtmes on-sSXcrtmes multiplied, the court, were |