— 3^0 The Open Court. DEVOTED TO THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE. Two Dollars per Year. No. 287. (Vol. VII.— 8.) CHICAGO, ) FEBRUARY 23, 1893. '( Single Copies, 5 Cents. Copyright by The Open Court Publishing Co.—Reprints are permitted only on condition of giving full credit to Author and Publisher. than by daily massacres. AUTOS-DA-FK. They also believed in the necessity of popular pastimes, and realised the wisdom BY DR. FELIX L. 0SW.4LD. of propitiating the leaders of victorious armies, and Moral philosophers have often expressed the opin- under the best as well as under the worst of the twenty- ion that no change in the by-laws of ethics will ever six world-kings the significance of the vce victis was affect the stability of certain conventional maxims brought home to vanquished foes and captured crimi- not strictly compatible, in all cases, with our present nals in those orgies of bloodshed which have been conceptions of ideal justice. Among the numerous called the "foulest stain on the records of the human proofs demonstrating the permanence of those inter- race." national compromise axioms we might mention the Yet among the Roman writers who utterly failed to facts that Might has always biased the standards of anticipate that verdict of posterity, there were some Right, and that no protest against the atrocity of in- exemplars of Stoic ethics, and some who frequently dividual sufferings has ever been permitted to inter- denounced acts of wanton cruelty to animals and men. fere with the promotion of principles supposed to in- Cicero, who treated his slaves more kindly than our volve the supreme welfare of the community. modern Caesars their soldiers, and entrusted his fortune Alexander the Great, in his sober moments, ap- to the care of one of his freedmen, defends the arena- pears to have been anything but a despot, and some games on the ground that "compelling guilty men to of his paladins were men of conspicuous clemency, fight is the best possible discipline against effeminacy and represented the most cultured cities and countries that can be presented to the eyes of the multitude." of the universe, but they all agreed on the necessity of The second epistle of the praefect Symmachus, after striking terror to the heart of their Asiatic foe. The urging the wisdom of equanimity and the renunciation welfare of Greece seemed to demand the intimidation of what Christian moralists would call the vanities of her Eastern rivals, and the staff of that army of civi- of earth, mentions the "impious suicide" of some lisation, in cold blood, ordered the crucifixion of twelve prisoners, which he had purchased for the purpose of thousand prisoners of war. making them fight at the funeral of his son, and who The law of Lycurgus, as a rule, sacrificed both would have exhausted his patience under the spite of class-privileges and the claims of mercy to the princi- fate if he had not recalled the fortitude of the mar- ples of stern justice, but state interests suggested an tyred Socrates. (Symmachus, "Epist." II, 46.) Pliny, exception in the case of the rebellious Helots, and the the eloquent advocate of humane reforms, extols the multiplication of the obnoxious race was prevented by merit of Trajan in "discouraging amusements that a combination of barbarous cruelty and worse than enervate the souls of men," (dancing and the comic barbarous treachery—perpetrated by men who in their drama, etc.,) and giving preference to those inspiring dealings with other enemies often preferred death to a noble contempt of wounds and even of death." The a breach of faith. same writer endorses the petition of the citizens of The ecclesiastic diatribes against the despotism of Verona, who had asked permission to establish a cir- the Roman Caesars are refuted by the simple fact that cus of their own, and remarks that "to refuse so gen- for centuries an empire of 4,500,000 square miles eral a request any longer would be cruelty rather than could be kept quiet with a standing army of 95,000 firmness." ("Epist.," \T, 34.) men, and the Pax Romana, inaugurated by policy of Trajan, the idol of the golden age of paganism, de- the Emperor Augustus, will perhaps remain the near- voted at least 200,000 men to the spectacles of the est earthly approach to the realisation of the millen- arena, (10,000 of them once on a single day,) and Ti- nium dream. But the successors of Augustus recognised tus, whose kindliness of disposition had so endeared the fact that the turbulent elements of the vast metrop- him to his subjects that the news of his death threw olis could be pacified by means of liberality more easily the inhabitants of all the Mediterranean coast-lands 3568 THE OPEN OOURX. into mourning—the same "World's Delight" ruler mission. He extended the time of grace intervening attested, in the opinion of his biographer, his amia- between an ecclesiastic injunction and the institution bility of character by "jesting with the people during of criminal proceedings, and he multiplied the number the combats of the gladiators." (Suetonius, "Ti- of indulgences granted to minors and "pagans" (Mo- tus," VIII.) hammedans, etc.) recently arrived from foreign parts. The inhumanities practiced by hundreds of mediae- He was, in all his private transactions, a righteous val abbots in the treatment of their monks reached the man, and his thousands of ultra-savage and ultra- ne plus ultra of systematic cruelty— since additional bestial cruelties were not acts of passion or malevolence, afflictions would have produced a speedier death, and but in the strictest sense, acts of faith. the tortures of heretics in many parts of southern In i86g the gardener of Capt. Elphinstone was torn Europe were such as to justify the belief that pity had to pieces in the suburbs of Lucknow by a mob of Hindu from the world yet a plurality of those same fanatics who had seen him shoot a Hanuman monkey. flown ; ministers of woe were undoubtedl}' men of humane That mob was composed of men who treat their chil- disposition and of unselfish devotion to what they dren and servants with infinite kindness and who would considered the best interests of the human race. Their rather submit to the decimation of their crops than lift creed had made them connect the promotion of that a stone against a rice-bird, but they were firmly con- interest with the sacrifice of natural reason and the vinced that the murder of a sacred ape would call natural instinct of pity on the altar of faith, and in down the vengeance of heaven, and they lost no time their crusade against the champions of rationalism in averting the ruin of the community by the sacrifice they would have considered it a preposterous aberra- of the reckless offender. Autos-da-f6, in honor of tion of weakness to weigh the transient horrors of an Brahmin dogmas, are not limited to the present cen- auto-da-f(5 against the eternity of torture prepared for tury, for three thousand years ago the mild rulers of all whom the influence of the condemned sceptic Hindostan enforced a law that punished with death might have caused to swerve from the path of ortho- every participant in a riot against the authority of a doxy. Brahmin. He who contradicted a priest of Brahm was Pedro Rodriguez, one of the most active of the punished with the loss of his tongue ; a blow was Spanish inquisitors, was so averse to the sight of hu- avenged by the amputation of the right arm, intruders man suffering that he always withdrew from the ses- upon the privacy of a praying Rishi could be attacked sions of his tribunal when the judges ordered the tor- with a club, and slain on the spot, if they refused to ture of a witness, and the personal appeals of some of leave. It was the barbarity of dogmatism, the aber- the condemned caused him more than one sleepless ration of a mild-mannered, patient, and passive people, night and repeatedly made him pray for death as the becoming cruelly active in the interest of faith. only refuge from the cruel conflict between duty and The decadence of religious fanaticism has not ob- inclination. viated the possibility of such aberrations. The glare The Dominican Planedis, who signed innumerable of publicity shed upon the recent fire-orgies of Judge sentences of death, was so scrupulous in the examina- Lynch at Paris, Texas, puts that fact in the clearest tion of evidence that he sacrificed the fortune of his light. The perpetrators of that portentous outrage family in paying expenses exceeding the available re- were no border-ruffians. They were, as a class, men sources of the court, and at last lost his life (1235) on of education, of charitable habits, of rather liberal a journey undertaken for the purpose of examining views on questions of politics and municipal adminis- additional witnesses. Torquemada himself was a man trations. They have abolished oppressive rent-laws of charitable and even generous impulses, and his re- and seem to favor the cause of temperance. Their plies to the appeals of his victims often suggest the school-commissioners discourage Knout-methods of answer of the Gascon captain, whose regiment had re- education. Their county rejected a proposed tramp- ceived orders to grant no quarter: " Detnandez-woi law, rather than involve the destitute home-seeker in touU chose, monsieur, mais pour la vie, pas moyen," said the fate of the shiftless vagrant.