ANCIENT FORMS OF EXECUTION.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLIII, Issue 105, 1 May 1909, Page 3

ANCIENT FORMS OF EXECUTION.

DROWNING AS A DEATH

PENALTY.

The revival in France of the guillotine as a method of despatching criminals convicted of capital offences recalls the fact that execution by drowning was established by Henri Quatre, only to be revived by one of his successors. It was finally abolished as a stitutory method of execution by the earliest decrees of the great revolutionaries. As late as the eighteenth centry, death by drowning was decreed to a felon in Edinburgh, and in the middle ages it was a conimon enough mode of doing a convicted criminal to death. That execution of this nature was considered as humane as any other, so far as the victim was concerned, is shown by the fact that it was not unknown among the early Jews, who varied the punishment _of stoning adulteresses by drowning them. Among the Egyptians it was common. The Roman Lex Cornelia sanctioned the method by placing it on the statute records. Tacitus tells us that the Germans copied the practice from the Romans. The Teuton termed it the " last baptism," and he did not allow his powers of imagination to sleep when he set about devising additional varieties which should add to th« excitement attending upon the doomed person's departure from life. The convict was sown up, Monte Christo fashion, in a bag, and with him were enclosed a vicious dog, a hungry cat, a violent rooster, a venomous viper, all very much alive and, presumably, kicking. For what reason it is hard to see but death by drowning was by many people considered preferable for criminal women. In the case of very debased or very mean offenders the Roman had a more or less pleasant fashion of drowning the doomed ones in marshes, first encasing them in elaborate crates.

For refined cruelty in killing off their female criminals, the earlier Albanians were certainly the most inventive in tho matter of ingenuity. It is commonly known, of course, that even the modern Albanian has less respect for womankind than any other known male in tho human catalogue, not even excluding the Chinese. The approved method of doing a criminal, or even a displeasing woman, to death prevalent among them up to rather less than a century ago was to chain her in a tank, into which, when the water reached her breast, it was allowed to recede, sometimes back to her ankles, when the refilling of the tank began anew. If the woman had children the tor-

turewas varied by the drowning "or mutilation of them before her eyes. To various parts of her body was attached such food as attracts rats, of which a number would be let loose.

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