CURRENT TOPICS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXX, Issue 15184, 23 December 1909, Page 6

CURRENT TOPICS.

THE STEI.YKEIL TRIAL.

In the great Steinheil case, one of the most remarkable trials of re-

cent years, no fewer than eighty witnesses were examined. Tho "dossier" of the caso comprised 3500 documents and 15,000 pages. The rush for seats at the trial was remarkable. The Court in which the trial was conductod had very little accommodation for the general public, and only those who had gained places iu the front part of tho ivaiting queue outside the doors had any chance of admission. A grotesque trado in standing places in the queue sprang up during the hearing of the caso. Poor mon stood all night outside the gates, sometimes in a temperature below freezing point, in order to sell their places in the queue next morning. The places brought from £2 to £3, and at this price twenty or thirty well-dressed women bought standing-room in the queue from the ragged occupants. To British minds one of the most amazing features of the trial in Paris was the vindictive way iji which the Court played the part of accuser against Mdme Stoinheil. It was strictly in accordance with French law that the Judge should act as a prosecuting counsel, but In this case his harsh and bullying methods were pressed;to the most extreme limits. They caused a revulsion of feeling in favour of the unhappy woman. The legal procedure in French trial has been explained by a well-known London lawyer. '' Save for the bodily torture," he said, "tho French procedure is almost purely inquisitional. The object is, by tricks, devices and terrorism, to force a confession. In cases like that of Mdme Steinheil the examination is often brutal. But M. de Valles is within his right not only to cross-examine in a manner which shocks an English mind, but to argue with the witness, without check and with but little remonstrance from those who represent Mdme Steinheil. The harsh methods employed in this caso are not exceptional, though pressed almost beyond conceivable limits. In a trial of a woman charged with matricide and the murder of her husband, as is Mdme Steinheil, especially it she be innocent, the mode of seeking to establish her guilt is ghastly. The only check is the jury, who, with French gallantry, seldom convict a woman, although tho ovidence of criminality seems complete. It is, perhaps, on that account that a confession by force js so unduly pressed." It was doubtless because of the brutality of the Judge that Mdme Steinheil's acquittal was received with such popular demonstrations of delight.

AWAKENED BY

A remarkable case of cataleptic sleeps to end which a doctor resorted

hytnotisii. successfully to hypnotio suggestion, was reported last month from Milan. The sleeper was found late at night in a carriage of a railway train at a wayside station in Northern Italy. All efforts to awaken him in the train were fruitless, and the man was therefore carried to tho police station, and a doctor was summoned. Tho professional investigation showed that the man was in a cataleptic trance, and he was ordered to be removed to tho hospital. The mysteriously somnolent traveller was a middle-aged man, decently attired as a well-to-do artisan, and his features were characteristically of the German typo. For forty-eight hours he continued to sleep, remaining perfectly insensible even to tho disturbing influence of pinpricks, and making no response to the administration of stimulants. The director of tho hospital, supposing that tho man could understand French, presently tried to hypnotise him, and ordered him in that language to get up and open his eyes. A shudder passed through tho sleeper's body, but otherwise tho doctor's summons remained unheeded. Being persuaded that the man was a psychopathic subject, the doctor then called upon a German resident and begged him to repeat tho summons to awake in the German language. Tho experiment met with success. Hearing his mother-tongue, the sleeper shivered, lifted his arms, rubbed his eyes, and stared vacantly at the unknown persons around him. It took him some time' to recover hi 6 faculties. Then he spoke and told his story. Ludwig Heuli was his name,

and ho was a workman. From Widnau he had gone to Romo and Loreto on a religious pilgrimage. At Rome he bad visited every church, praying intensely.at each, and at Loreto he had remained for some hours in ecstatic rapture before the famous statue of tho Madonna. After taking the train ho remombered littlo or nothing before ho opened his eyes in the Ancona hospital. Evidently ho was a dooply religious man, whoso faith had degenerated into fanaticism, and this, in combination with his neuropathic temperament and the powerful suggestion of the holy things he had seen, had caused him to fall into a kind of hypnotio trance.

JFIREWALKEVG.

Fire-walking seems to

have become in these later days a rather less

mysterious business than it was before the Fiiian visitors made it one of the side-shows at the New Zealand Exhibition three years ago, but the Cook Islands correspondent of tho "New Zealand Herald" tells of a feat performed at Atiu by a native of Borabora and two companions, which is likely to revive some of tho former interest in the art. The display took place at the main settlement on tho island, within an enclosure of corrugated iron, and the admission, always an important part of such exhibitions, was one shilling a head. The fire for heating the stones had been burning for twelve hours whon the spectators began to arrive, and the assistants then started to remove the blazing logs and level the stones. The pit was about 20ft long by 12ft broad, with a step of 2ft down on to the heated stones. When all was ready a hymn was sung and a prayer offered, and the leader and his two companions, attired in their " Sunday best," and profusely decorated with flowers, stood in a row at the edge of the pit, beat the stones with their bunches of ti, and after thrice repeating an incantation in the Tahitian tongue, went through the fiery furnace like the three Hebrew heroes of old, stepping deliberately from stone to stone, to the other side. They did not appear to suffer any inconvenience, and, turning round, they called upon others to follow them across the heated 6tones, exhorting them at the same time to go straight forward and not to look back or, like Lot's wife, they would come to grief. Quito a number ventured upon the feat, including the Resident Agent, Major Large, who went twice through the ordeal, and though he felt the heat severely on his face his feet were not even scorched. Tho heat of the stones was so intense that tho green wood poles ueed in raking out the logs were speedily ablaze. The natives assured the "Herald's" correspondent that the stones in the pit would have cooked several whole pigs or a whole bullock or two, and some hundredweight of vegetables, and he saw no roason to doubt their statement. Major Large is by no means the first European to essay -the feat. Colonel Gudgeon, while Resident Commissioner at. Rarotonga, joined in a fire-walking ceremony, ' and came off scathless; but Dr Craig, who was medical officer in the islands at the time, was' less fortunate, and in attemptingto follow his chief was rather badly burned.