The extreme penalty of the law is nowadays inflicted in Spain by the _garrote_, a method of strangulation by the tightening of an iron collar, the substitute for hanging introduced by King Ferdinand VII (1820). Till then the hanging was carried out in the clumsiest and most brutal manner. The culprits were dragged by the executioner up the steps of a ladder leaning against the scaffold. At a certain height he mounted on the victim's shoulders and thus seated flung himself off with his victim underneath. As they swung to and fro the hangman's fingers were busily engaged in choking the convict so as to complete the strangulation. The _garrote_ is a very simple contrivance. The condemned man sits on a stool or low seat, leaning his back against a strong, firm upright post to which an iron collar is fixed. This, when opened, encircles his neck, and is closed and tightened by a powerful screw, worked by a lever from behind. Death is instantaneous. Public executions must prove very popular performances with a people who still revel in a bull fight and flock to look at the hairbreadth escapes of human beings from hardly undeserved death by the horns of a fierce beast tortured into madness. De Foresta, an Italian traveller,[25] tells us that never was a greater concourse seen in Madrid than that which collected in 1877 to witness the execution of two murderers, Mollo and Agullar, when it was estimated that 80,000 people were present. Ford describes an execution in Seville in 1845 when the crowd was enormous and composed largely of the lower orders, of the humbler ranks, "who hold the conventions of society very cheap and give loose rein to their morbid curiosity to behold scenes of terror, which operates powerfully on the women, who seem irresistibly impelled to witness sights the most repugnant to their nature and to behold sufferings which they would most dread to undergo," and many of whom "brought in their arms young children at the beginning of life to witness its conclusion." "They desire to see how the criminal will conduct himself, they sympathise with him if he displays coolness and courage, and despise him on the least symptom of unmanliness." [25] La Spagna; Da Irun a Malaga, by Adolfo de Foresta, Bologna, 1879.