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One purpose of this book is to entertain the reader—if it may have the happy luck to do that. Another is, to remind him that what is called Christian Civilization is so young and new that it had not yet entered the world when this our century was born. In fact, the preparations for it—I mean, preparations really worthy the name—were not yet begun only about seventy or eighty years before the birth of our century. We do not know what the laws of the mythical Arthur’s day were, and so I have supplied the deficiency with the legal atrocities of a far later time; but I have invented none, for that was not necessary. And there was no opportunity. All that man could invent for the brutalizing of his fellow man had already been invented. I have merely borrowed the laws—and the episodes which illustrate them—from history; from all the records of several Christian countries and various Christian centuries; and some of the [begin page 517] harshest of these laws are of comparatively recent date, particularly those borrowed from pre-revolutionary France and from the slavery regime of our own country. If any are inclined to rail at our present civilization, why—there is no hindering him; but he ought to sometimes contrast it with what went before, and take comfort—and hope, too.

My object has been to group together some of the most picturesque odious laws which had have had vogue in the Christian countries within the past ten eight or ten centuries, and illustrate them by the incidents of a story.

There was never a time when America applied the death penalty to more than 14 crimes. But England, within the memory of men still living, had in her list of crimes 223 which were punishable by death! And yet from the beginning of our existence down to a time within the memory of babes stillborn England has harped distressed herself piteously over the ungentleness of our Connecticut Blue Laws. Those Blue Laws should have been spared English criticism, for several/two reasons: 1. 1. They were so insipidly mild, by contrast with the bloody and atrocious laws of England of the same period, as to seem characterless and colorless when brought one brings them into that awful presence. 2. The Blue Laws never had any existence.* They were the fancy-work of an English clearclergyman; they were never a part of any statute book. And yet they could have been made to serve a useful and merciful purpose: if they had been injected into the English law, they dilution would have given to the whole a less lurid aspect; or, to figure the effect in another way, they would have been coca mixed into vitriol.

I have drawn no laws and no illustrations from the twin civilizations of Hell and Russia. To have ventured into that atmosphere would have defeated my purpose: which was to show a great and genuine civil progress in Christendom in these few later generations, in the matter of toward mercifulness—a wide and general relaxing of the grip of the law. Russia had to be left out, because exile to Siberia remains, and in that single punishment is gathered together [begin page 518] and concentrated all the bitter inventions of all the black ages for the infliction of suffering upon human beings. Exile for life from one’s hearthstone and one’s idols—this is rack, thumbscrew, the waterdrop, fagot and stake, tearing asunder by horses, flaying alive—it is all these in one; and not compacted into hours, but drawn out into years, each year a century, and the whole a mortal immortality of torture and despair. While exile to Siberia remains, one will be obliged to admit that there is one country in Christendom where the punishments of all the ages are still in force preserved and still inflicted; that there is one country in Christendom where no advance has been made toward modifying the medieval penalties for offences against society and the State.

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*Blue-Laws, True and False, by J. Hammond Trumbull; Hartford Conn., 1876.

The strange laws which one encounters here and there in this book, are not known to have existed in King Arthur’s time, of course, but it is fair to presume that they did then exist, since they still existed in Christian lands in far later times—times customarily called, with unconscious sarcasm, “civilized and enlightened.” The episodes by which these laws are illustrated in this book are not inventions, but are drawn from history; not always from English history, but mainly from that source. Human liberty—for white people—may fairly be said to be one hundred years old this year; what stood for it in any previous century of the world’s history cannot rationally be allowed to count.