WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 246, 18 July 1928, Page 10

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

The only thing mope annoying to the Germans than that Italian Fascist! should go planting flags on the North Pole is that Russian Bolsheviks should rescue them.

'The county councils think that city roads cost nothing to maintain—but they don’t seem to have studied ‘Wellington city finance.

As an instance of a relapse to barbarism it is recorded in the news that in Kiangsu province in China they have reverted to strangling in lieu of shooting as the ofliclal mode of inflicting capital punishment. Shooting, the Chinese declare, lets Hie offender off too easily, and it is desirable that bis exit should be more painful. It cannot be said that civilisation has reached any uniformity as to the most desirable mode of execution. In British countries hanging has been the rule during recent years, the last person io be beheaded in England being Lord Lovat in 1746. Up to 1790, however, female traitors were liable to be burnt alive, and it was not until 1870 that the part of the death sentence ordering hanged persons to be drawn and quartered was abolished. Shooting, of course, remains the military death penalty, and the only variation during the past century of the ordinary mode of inflicting it was the blowing to pieces from the mouth of cannon of some mutineers during the Indian Mutiny.

On the Continent of Europe there is still a great variety of methods of execution in different countries, ranging from the guillotine, axe. aud sword to the hangman’s rope, while Spain apparently still sticks to the garrote. This originally began as plain strangulation by tying the prisoner’s neck to a post by a cord, sticking a club (garrote) through the cord, and twisting it until death ensued. A later improvement has been an iron collar instead o’’ a cord, aud a knob which is screwed or thrust in by a lever to dislocate the spinal column, while a small knife Is simultaneously driven in to sever it. In the United States electrocution was introduced in New York State hi 1889 as the most humane method of killing, though in recent eases some newspaper writers present when the electric chair has been in use have professed to have detected signs that the victims suffer intense momentary agony. Only last mouth a New York electrician bent on suicide erected' a home-made electric chair in his bathroom, and connecting it up with the electric light circuit, effectually dispatched himself.

It is only a century since Germany had its last execution by breaking on t(ie wheel, a process which has left the world with that much-used phrase the ‘coup de grace," the origin of ’ ivjiich few people wb use it are problubly aware. In this form of torture }ind execution the victim was bound on I to a slowly revolving cart-wheel while his bones were broken by blows from an iron bar. Sometimes it was ordered that at an early stage the executioner should kill outright by blows on the chest aud stomach, tliesu bloXvs being termed coups de grace, and hi France the criminal was usually strangled after the second or third blow. : in Britain Henry VIII was the nation's staunchest believer in capital punishment, and by no means confined his favours to his own domestic circle, for he executed 72,000 of his subjects as well. For sixteen years during his reign bulling alive was a legalised mode o't execution.

It is tbc fashion to note centenaries of all kinds, and a reader sends along a book from which it appears that; it is a hundred years ago this year since the first roses were planted in New Zealand. In 1824 Mr. George Clarke came out to New Zealand as a missionary at flic Bay of Islands and occupied the house built liy Mr." Kemp in 1819, which is to-day the oldest house in New Zealand. Mr. Clarkes son, the late Rev. George Clarke, who was for many years Chancellor of the University of Tasmania, records in a little book published by him in 1903 (lie planting of syuie roses by his lather. In IS2S a sister was born and died in infancy, George Clarke junior being then five years old. "An incident associated with her death,” lie wrote, “made a lasting impression on hie. . . . My father had a short time before got a box of plants from Sydney, among them some precious cabbage roses, the first. I suppose tliat were ever grown in New Zealand. . . . My father carefully planted and tended them until the buds began to form. I renicmber his taking me by the hand, ripping off a half-open bud, and then our walking into the study and putting the. flower in the dead baby’s band. I cannot lie sure, but I think that was the first oil our sweet English roseS that eier bloomed in New Zealand.’

The young George Clarke lived to bo ninety years old, only passing uvay in 1913. After being educated in Tasmania he returned to New Zealand, and was official Maori interpreter at the first sittings of the Supreme Court held in the colony in 184,1. was interpreter for Commissioner Spiiiu 111 investigating Hie native land purchases, and in 1844 be helped lo arrange the purchase of 400,000 acres Hie Maoris for the proposed Scots Colony in Otago, and afterwards pointed with pride to the fact that no disputes ever arose about this purchase. In 1846 be settled in Tasmania, became a Congregational minister, amj later in life w ;is the principal founder of the University of Tasmania, an undertaking that micountered many obstacles and was only carried through by his perseverance. Says the new "Australian Cyclopaedia” of him: “His learning, eloquence, saintly life, and zeal for education and religion, combined with a broad outlook and a genuine humanity, gave him an influence in the community such as perhaps no other man of his time possessed.”

America is shortly to have another biggest ever in the way of bridges, for a proposal is on foot to Uuihl <i huge structure across the Narrows in New York Harbour linking up Brooklyn and Staten Island. This bridge, of the suspension type, is planned to have a span of 4500 feet, by far the longest in the world, and there will be. a clearance for shipping of 235 feet, or JOO feel: more than that Of the Brooklyn suspension bridge. The towers supporting the bridge are planned, to be GOO feet, tall, or nearly as high as ‘Wellington's Mount Victoria. 8)d--nev's bin bridge has a channel span of. 1650 feet. The longest bridge in the world is said to be that over the Danube at Cerno Voda, which, with its several viaducts and approaches, has a. total length of over 12 miles—about as far as from Wellington to the Taita.