How illogical it seems that a citizen whose State executed this form of torture on its prisoners should hold up the holy hands of horror at the variations of cruelty that satisfied the lust of the unspeakable Turk! The _peine forte et dure_ remained one of the pillars of our law until the reign of George III. and was carried into execution in the reign of Queen Anne and George II.--so obstinately do we cling to our ancient precedents and so fearful are we of facing the narrow paths that lead to better things. When Oliver Goldsmith wrote, "Laws grind the poor and rich men rule the law," I do not know that he wished to make any specially unkind attack upon the rich. I imagine he merely intended to state a fact which seems in all ages to have been universally true. I do not suppose that in the middle of the eighteenth century anyone in the least recognised the actual horrors that were going on around him unless it was some poet and dreamer like Oliver himself. The strong, sensible men of that generation were as assured of their own righteousness as they are to-day. Dr. Johnson told Dr. Maxwell that "the poor in England were better provided for than in any other country of the same extent; he did not mean little cantons or petty republics. Where a great proportion of the people (said he) are suffered to languish in helpless misery that country must be ill-policed and wretchedly governed; a decent provision for the poor is the test of civilisation. Gentlemen of education, he observed, were pretty much the same in all countries; the condition of the lower orders, the poor specially, was the true mark of national discrimination." The good Doctor rolled all that excellent stuff out one evening in 1770 to the Rev. Dr. Maxwell, the assistant preacher of the Temple, who, like Boswell, faithfully recorded what he remembered of it in the morning--I doubt not that if Dr. Johnson had lived in 1670, or 1870, or 1970, or had flourished under Caligula or Nero, he would have rolled out the same sonorous complacent nonsense to some sort of faithful human gramophone who would have recorded the utterances of his master's voice with a canine credulity in its omniscience.