The Question.

grammar, rhetoric, philology, and of the exact significances of dialect, patois, argots, and vernacular speech." (Morgan, Law of Lit, vol. i. p. 109.) Some judges have objected to that wellnigh universal medium of emphatic expres sion, slang, for instance, Sir James Hannen, in a divorce suit, complains that " it is to be observed that it is not unusual at the present day for young men and women to apply such terms as "dreadful" and "awful" without any nice consideration of their fitness (Dur ham v. Durham, 10 P. D. p. 82.) (Poor judge! happy would it be for humanity if he had nothing worse to complain of in the cases brought before him.) In the Vendotian, Gwentian, and Dimetian codes, where the money value of each por tion of the body is given, it is said, " the

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tongue is equal to the worth of all the other members, because it defends them all." In conclusion, we quote the words of a Jewish Rabbi, long since sleeping with his fathers : — "What care has not the All-wise Creator be stowed on the chief organ of speech! All the other principal members of the human body are situated externally, and that either upright or pending The tongue alone is placed internally, and in a horizontal position, that it might remain quiet and steady. Nay, that it might be kept within its natural bounds, he has encompassed it with two walls : one of ivory, the teeth; the other of softer substance, the lips. Further, to allay its intense ardor, he has surrounded it with an over flowing rivulet, the salivary glands. Yet, notwith standing all this Divine care, what mischief does it not do? How many conflagrations does it raise! What destruction does it cause!"

THE QUESTION. IT is, perhaps, almost impossible for us in these days, when the suggestion that the lash should be used on wife-beaters and such-like brutes is met with a howl from a large section of the public, to realize the im mense part which has been played through out the world's history by torture in its various forms. We may take it that there were three different objects in the applica tion of torture. The first of these would, perhaps, be the earliest, and was to give pleasure to some tyrant in the spectacle of suffering in others : it is just possible to imagine a mind so brutal as to take pleasure in such a thing. The second object was punishment; and this we can easily under stand in a low state of civilization, when men had nothing, or next to nothing, in the way of refining influences around them. Even now, although perhaps we do not mean it, we are apt to say, when a man has committed some particularly brutal murder, that hanging is too good for him. So we

will admit that we can understand these first two objects. But what shall we say about the third, — the Question? Can we possibly bring ourselves to understand how answers wrung from a sufferer on the rack could be accepted as true? Yet this was the object which caused torture to flourish mostly, and which brought it to its highest pitch. Of course, the countries where torture — and more particularly in the form which gives the heading to this article, " The Question " — obtained most were those countries where the Inquisition reigned The terrible scenes which went on in secret in the dungeons of the Inquisition can never be known; but when the Inquisition fell and its prisons were destroyed, enough came to light to present pictures of almost undreamed-of cruelty. The fear of the Inquisition was so great, when once a man was arrested no relation or friend dared to come forward to defend him or give evidence on his behalf, lest he