the evil which their father had done in slay ing these foes of Israel. It is as if Bismarck had sought the favor of the French by giv ing into their hands the descendants of Bliicher, to be guillotined on the Place de la Concorde. The horrible mutilations to which criminals were formerly subjected resulted from an endeavor to administer strictly even-hand ed justice. What could be fairer than to punish perjury by cutting off the two fingers which the perjurer had held up in taking the oath? It was the popular belief that the fingers of an undetected perjurer would grow out of the grave, seeking retributive amputation, as a plant seeks the light, and that his ghost would never rest until this penalty was inflicted. The Carolina, or criminal code of Charles the Fifth, required that incendiaries should be burned alive : and an old law, cited by Ddppler in his "Theatrum Pcenarum," condemned a man who dug up and removed a boundary-stone to be buried in the earth up to the neck, and to have his head plowed off with a new plow. Ivan Basilowitch, a Muscovite prince, ordered that an ambassador who did not uncover in his presence should have his hat nailed to his head : and it is a feeble survival of the same conception of fit punishment that makes the American farmer nail the hawk to his barn door. That the feeling in which such enactments originated still lies scarcely skin-deep under our civilization is evident from the force and suddenness with which it comes to the sur face under strong public excitement, as when Cincinnati rioters burned the court house, because they were dissatisfied with the verdicts of the juries. The childish disposition to punish irra tional creatures and inanimate objects, which is common to the infancy of individuals and of races, has left a distinct trace of itself in that peculiar institution of English law known as deodand, and derived partly from early Jewish, and partly from old German usages
and traditions. " If a horse," says Blackstone, " or any other animal, of his own motion kill as well an infant as an adult, or if a cart run over him, they shall in either case be forfeited as deodants." If a man, in driving" a cart, tumbles to the ground and and loses his life by the wheel passing over him, if a tree falls on a man and causes his death, or if a horse kicks his keeper and kills him, then the wheel, the tree, and the horse are deodands pro rege, and are to be sold for the benefit of the poor. Blackstone's theories of the origin of deo dands are exceedingly vague and unsatisfac tory. His statement that they were inten ded to punish the owner of the forfeited propperty for his negligence, and also his asser tion that they were " designed, in the blind days of popery, as an expiation for the souls of such as were snatched away by sudden death," are both incorrect. In most cases the owner was perfectly innocent, and very frequently was the victim of the accident. He suffered only incidentally from a penalty imposed for a wholly different purpose, just as a slaveholder endures loss when his human chattel commits murder and is hanged for it. The primal object was to atone for the taking of life in accordance with certain crude conceptions of retribution. In hier archies the prominent idea was to appease the wrath of God, who otherwise might visit mankind with famine and pestilence and divers retaliatory scourges. For this reason the property of a suicide was deodand. Thus the wife and children of the deceased, the very persons who had already suffered most from his fatal act, were punished for it by being robbed of their rightful inheritance. Yet this was by no means the intention of the law-makers. Ancient legislators uni formly considered a felo de se as a criminal against society and the state, a kind of traitor. The man had enjoyed the support and pro tection of the civil and political body during his infancy and youth, and, by taking his own life, he shook off the responsibilities and
