It is among the proudest boasts of this country that torture is not permitted within its borders: “Torture,” wrote Macaulay, “was inflicted for the last time in the month of May, 1640.” But pleasant though it is to think that it was in the beautiful springtime that the barbarous practice came to an end, this is unfortunately one of the cases in which our people allow themselves to be beguiled and fooled by very transparent quibbles; for a few minutes’ thought would suffice to convince the most complacent of Britons that while some specialized forms of judicial torture have been abandoned, other tortures, some of them not less painful and fully as repulsive, are being inflicted to this day--nearly three hundred years after the glorious date of abolition. For if “torture,” as etymology and the dictionaries and common usage tell us, means nothing more or less than the forcible infliction of extreme pain, it is not a technicality but an absurdity to pretend that it finds no place among twentieth-century institutions. Flogging is torture in a most literal sense, and in one of its grossest shapes: the “cat,” as Mr. G. K. Chesterton has well said, is “the rack without any of its intellectual reasons.”[28] The horror of the old naval and military lashings is within the memory of many officers who were compelled to witness them: how is the punishment any less savage in its nature because it is now administered in a less severe degree, and on men convicted of robbery with violence or some breach of prison discipline? In one of the Parliamentary debates of November, 1912, a Member who had been invited by the Home Secretary to examine the “cat,” gave it as his opinion that “if _that_ is not torture, then I do not know what torture is.”