DYING MADE EASY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume X, Issue 6, 11 February 1893, Page 135

DYING MADE EASY.

It is said that the guillotine has recently been introduced by the French into their colony of Tonquin, says the London Globe. Our neighbours, as all the world is aware, have had and still have plenty of work to do in the way of exterminating piracy in that vast and as yet unremunerative possession. And the method by which they endeavour to exterminate the pirate (when they catch him, which, as a rule, they do not) is that of decapitation. That ceremony has hitherto been performed in the primitive and rather barbarous native way. The culprit, being placed in a convenient position, used to light a cigarette and wait for the executioner to take a shot at his neck with a big sword. Sometimes the headsman aimed straight and sometimes he did not, and a feeling had long existed among the gentlemen of the piratical profession that an execution thus exe-

cuted was distinctively an unpleasant process for the patient. Consequently the introduction of the ‘ wood of

justice' has by no mean* produced the effect which the French authorities desired and expected. Instead of being impressed witli the horror of this mode of execution, tlie natives of Tonquin are said to be highly delighted with it. In fact, they legard the guillotine as a most ingenious article de Paris, and they have already witnessed one execution with every demonstration of enthusiasm. Dying, they say, is made so delightfully easy by this admirable invention of the superior European intelligence. The result is that considerable satisfaction is expressed in piratical circles, ami it is confidently anticipated that piracy will shortly increase very considerably, as nobody in Tonquin would mind being abbreviated instantaneously by the guillotine. Death, in short, lias lost most of its terror becau*e the process of dying lias been rendered so simple.