In Scotland, the administration of the criminal law has perhaps been, on the whole, as severe as in England. Mr. Erskine says that " those crimes that are in their conse quences most hurtful to society, are punished capitally or by death," a category that is certainly sufficiently indefinite; and anciently, it might be shown that the executions in Scotland for offenses corresponding to those which were capitally punished in Eng land, were, in proportion to the population, quite as numerous as those in the latter country. But in the more modern practice of Scotland, capital sentence was only pro nounced in the four pleas of the crown—viz., murder, rape, robbery, and willful tire raising, to which may be added housebreaking. At present the penal system in Scot land may be said to be identical with that in England, death, as a' punishment, being only inflicted in the case of convictions for murder.
With respect to the mode of executing C. P., we need not detain the reader by any account of the obsolete cruelties and tortures of former times. It may suffice to state that hanging and beheading are the two methods which now, for the most part, are prac ticed in the different European states—indeed, with the exception of Spain, by all. In
the last country, the death of the culprit is instantaneously caused by the garrotte (q.v.). In England, Scotland, and Ireland, and in all the dependencies of the crown, the con vict is hanged; while in France he is decapitated by the guillotine (q.v.), au instrument which an old Scotch machine called the maiden (q.v.), and used for the same purpose, very much resembled. In most of the German states, beheading is the mode of execu tion adopted; but in Austria, criminals convicted of capital offenses are hanged, as in England. See EXECUTION.
The following works may be consulted on the subject of this article: Basil Montagu On the Punishment of Death, 3 vols. (1809, 1812, 1813), in which he collects the opinions of different eminent authorities; Memoirs of Sir Samuel Romilly, 3 vole. (1840), and his miscellaneous law pamphlets; Jeremy Bentham's Rationale of Punishment (1S30); Bec caria's Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1775); Edward Gibbon Wakefield's Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in. the Metropolis (1831); and Frederic Hill's Crime, its Amount, Causes, and Remedies (1853).