A Handbook on Hanging

It has been, and still is, a matter of opinion whether, if you wish to kill your undesireable, it is better to let him die quietly in a concentration camp, flay him until he dies, hurl him over a precipice, burn, drown or suffocate him; or entomb him alive and leave him to perish slowly in the silence of his grave; or asphyxiate him agonizingly in a lethal chamber, or press him to death or cut off his head; or produce a sort of coma by means of an electric current that grills him in parts and then, in the name of autopsy, permit the doctors to finish him off - as they do in certain of the United States of North America; or break his neck in strangulation by hanging as the English do.

It is all a matter of taste, temperament, and fashion.

But one fact emerges: man has not grown less cruel with the passage of that illusory thing called time; though in many parts of the world he has become a far greater hypocrite than he used to be.  In the Ts'in Dynasty in China the heads of undesirables were expeditiously removed by a stroke of the official sword, whereas in the same country in our own century men and women had their ears and strips of flesh cut off, fried, and eaten before their eyes before execution; and children were ordered to behead their parents. 

The methods of dispatch are without number and of infinite variety.

The history of killing is the history of the world, and it is therefore hardly surprising to find that in nothing has man shown greater ingenuity than in inventing and perfecting methods and machines for killing his fellow man.

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