DUST OF THE PAST

Taranaki Daily News, 27 May 1933, Page 1 (Supplement)

DUST OF THE PAST

ANNIVERSARY MEMORIES

“Historicus.”)

(By

Habeas Corpus, the subject’s writ of right, was passed “for the better securing the liberty of the subject” on May 27, 1679. The day of the prorogation of Parliament, which saw the Royal assent given to the Habeas Corpus Act, is marked by historians as a great era in our history. The Act is one of the chief guards of English liberty, as well as being one of the best securities against tyranny ever devised. A writ of Habeas Corpus is a writ directed by courts of law .or equity to produce the body of a person illegally detained, and to state the reasons for such detention, so that the court may judge of their sufficiency. Simply, it made it unlawful in British law for anyone to be held a prisoner except on a charge for which he has been or is about to be tried. Actually this law was set out in Magna Charta, but it had been inefficacious for want of a stringent system of procedure. The act of Habeas Corpus filled the gap. No man could be huiried off secretly to jail, where his sufferings Would be unknown, or forgotten, and left there. In pre-Revolution days in France the lettre de cachet system had filled the Bastille. Orders were signed by the King and sold or given to his favourites, allowing them to fill in the name of the person they desired out of the way. Magna Charta saved the Englishman from that, and Habeas Corpus consummated the right of trial. It was owing mainly to the influence of the Earl of Shaftesbury that the Act was carried, and was a benefit- of such magnitude, that it might cover a multitude of the sins of that rather out-of-the-ordinary gentleman.

Dr. Guillotin was born on May 28, 1738. The French Revolutionists in their wonderful belief in themselves and their institutions claimed the patent rights of many old ideas. There is, probably none to which they have more right than the guillotine, although this picturesque instrument was known years before they made such drastic use of it. They certainly’ popularised it, and gave it a definite name, although whether Dr. Guillotin really deserves the bloodthirsty associations that now must forever surround his name is doubtful, because he seems only to have suggested its use as a more humane way of decapitating people than the rough and ready method of the axe.

Nobles of Italy in the 13th century claimed the privilege of this way of leaving the world. They called the machine the mannaid. A similar instrument was employed in Germany in the middle ages, and one called the maiden, which differed • very slightly from the toy, of the Revolution, was used in Scotland during the 16th and 17th centuries. It was in fact used previously in France and the Dutch colonies, and by the Persians, to whom the credit for the invention is ascribed. A curious instrument of the kind was used in England in the 16th century. Horse and cattle stealers were executed by this particular machine. The justice of death for such crimes is not worth discussion to-day, _ but the method was this. The stolen animal was fastened to a pin, and, at a given signal? driven forward, thus releasing the blade. Whoever schemed this devilish form of retribution must have been something of a cynic. , .

On May 29, 1453, just after midnight, the Turks under Mahomet . the Conqueror, who commanded an army of 150,000 men, assaulted the great breach which their cannon had made in the landward walls of Constantinople. They were repulsed by Constantine Palaeologos', the last Christian Emperor of Constantinople, and Giustianini, the Genoese crusader. Together these heroes of a lost cause only commanded about 8,000 men, but the fortifications of New Rome were huge, triple, rising over 40 feet from a deep moat, strengthened by stockades and earthen banks where the cannon had breached them.

Thrice the janissaries and other Moslem troops were repulsed, but their combined numbers and valour at last carried the breach. The wounded Genoese commander' was borne away to die; the Emperor was cut down sword in hand and the Sultan rode over heaps of the slain, through a city in which his followers were looting and burning and murdering, to give thanks to the. great cathedral of St.' Sophia, thenceforth to be a mosque. . \ Greek legend reports that when the tumult and shrieks arose in the streets a priest was saying mass at the high altar of St Sophia’s and that as the Turks entered the'church, cutting down the praying Christians right and left, the priest with the Host disappeared through the wall behind the altar and was never seen again nor will be till the day when mass is said in St. Sophia’s.

Nicholas 11, last Tsar of Rusia, came to the throne in November, 1894, and almost immediately married his beautiful cousin, Princess Alix of Hesse. He did not crown himself Emperor till May 30, 1896, when hundreds of thousands of peasants from many provinces of Russia gathered at Moscow in the hope of seeing and venerating him and his bride-as they passed to and from the ceremonies in the Kremlin.

Nicholas, a benignant young man, de-, lighted to be the father of his people, had approved a suggestion that the moujiks should each receive a free gift—a glass tumbler with coloured pictures of the Tsar and Tsarina on its sides. These were to be given away on the evening of the coronation at booths in the centre of a great parade ground, the Khodinsky Plain, outside the walls of Moscow. A glass for nothing—and with a picture of the almost divine Emperor upon it! A gift from the Tsar himself to his humble subjects.

The peasants could not control their greed, their excitement or their loyalty and while the Tsar and his guests were banqueting in the Kremlin an unnumbered horde converged on the booths. A few got glasses, which were crushed or snatched from them. Others, clutching their treasures, tried to fight their way out again while the unsatisfied pressed ever inwards. Soon the people, men, women and children, were struggling not for glasses, but for life. Strong men linked hands round their womenfolk and tried to force a way nut for them. Others even climbed on the shoulders of those in front and ran over the heads of the crowd.

When the press was at last dispersed, 2,000 corpses, many of those of women and children, lay round the wrecked booths. Russia had shown the world that its officials were incapable of organisation and that its peasantry could become inhuman with fear and greed, and the Little Father of his people had made a sad start to a sad reign. Less than ten years later his troops shot down the Petrograd workers on Red Sunday. Little more than 20 years later he abdicated.