as the silent part of the bench may be deemed, cannot be ignorant of the law, and would make themselves gratuitously contemptible if they pretended to participate in the feelings of the multitude. Besides the obvious use of juries as a check on judiciary proceedings for the safety of individuals, the institution is of high political importance. It is one of the hidden springs upon which the cumbrous machine of society is, as it were, suspended, and enabled thereby to sustain accidental shocks without coming to pieces. There was abundant justification in the early cantonal criminal codes for the abolition, by the federal constitution, of capital punishment[48] and corporal pains. Many of the codes were not distinguished for justice, gentleness, or rationality. Nowhere were witches more relentlessly pursued than in some of the Cantons of Switzerland. The laws denouncing them were of Draconian severity. Stern were the ordinances and strange the customs of the older Cantons. In 1666 an entire family, mother, son, and daughter, were burned in Unterwalden for practising forbidden arts. No less than one hundred and fifty individuals were executed at Geneva, in a period of fifty years, during the seventeenth century, for the capital offence of witchcraft, denominated _lèse-majesté divine au plus haut chef_. The last execution for sorcery was in Glarus in 1782. So late as 1824 a man was racked in Zug, and in the archives of Obwald appears an entry, in 1840, of a payment of thirty francs to the executioner for beating a prisoner, who had proved refractory under examination, with rods, in the torture-chamber. The Swiss historian Müller relates that one Sak, at Bern, was sentenced to be whipped, and led out of the gate by the executioner, for returning from banishment, and if he returned again he should be drowned; also Hanns, the public executioner of Bern, was banished two miles from the jurisdiction of the town for having spoken immodestly to respectable men and women, and if he returned he should have his eyes put out. An inn-keeper of Bern, having procured the seal of a councillor who lodged at his house, made use of it to forge obligations for sums of money which, supported by false witnesses, he claimed after an interval of several years; the fraud being discovered, he was broken upon the wheel, and the witnesses “boiled in a kettle.” In Zurich, any one clipping the coin, had his fingers clipped off, and was then hanged. In the council-room of the old Rathhaus of Appenzell can still be seen an instrument known as the “bocksfutter”; it consists of a long bench, on which delinquents, ordered to be punished with stripes, and prisoners, who were obstinate about admitting their guilt, were wont to be placed, with legs and arms outstretched as if they were going to swim; but every attempt to move these members was prevented by enclosing them in iron clamps firmly fastened to the bench; this preliminary completed, the executioner was called in,