Even during the period when the use of torture was most prevalent its cruelty was recognized and its employment deplored as an evil necessary to the due administration of justice. In all ages there have been leading writers and think ers who denounced the use of torture, not only because of its cruelty and its debas ing effect upon public morals, hut because of its unreliability as a means of discovering the truth, since it oftentimes led the innocent from weakness and exhaustion to plead guilty or accuse others of crimes which had not been committed. The horrors of the Inquisition and the excessive use of judicial torture from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century led to a gradual but nevertheless progressive change of public sentiment, which ultimately caused its disuse in all the countries of Europe. The use of torture was abolished in Prussia, Saxony, .Austria, and Switzerland by the middle of the eighteenth century. Its use in Russia was lim ited by command of Catharine II. in 1762, and finally abolished in 1801. ]n France it was abolished in 1789 (although temporarily restored by the Bourbons in 1814), in Wfirttemberg, in 1806, in Bavaria in IS07, in Hanover in 1822, and in Baden in IS3I.
The instruments and methods of judicial tor ture have been numerous. Among the Greeks torture was inflicted by the rack, the scourge, by thrusting the victim bent double into a vault which compelled him to retain that position until his suffering became extreme, the injection of vinegar into the nostrils, and torture by ap plieat ion of fire. The Romans also made use of the rack, torture by fire, the scourge, and mutilat ing the flesh by hooks. The most celebrated in
strument of torture is the rack, an oblong hori zontal frame, on which the accused was stretched, while cords, attached to his legs and arms, were gradually strained by a lever or windlass, an operation which, when carried to extreme sever ity, dislocated the joints of the wrists and ankles. It is as old as the second century in the south of Europe, and seems to have been known in one form to the Greeks, hut is said to have been unknown in England till introduced into the Tower by the Duke of Exeter, constable of the Tower, whence it acquired the name of the 'Duke of Exeter's daughter.' In Germany the rack was sometimes furnished with a roller, armed with spikes, rounded off, over which the sufferer was drawn backward and forward. The wheel, upon which the victim was bound and his hones broken by the gradual application of force, was also used throughout the Middle Ages. Among the lesser tortures may be men tioned the thmnbikins, hoots, pincers, and mana cles; and in England an instrument called the Scavenger's (properly Skeffington's) daughter, the invention of Sir William Skeffington, lieu tenant of the Tower in the reign of Henry VItI. This enumeration. however, by no means includes all the methods, ingenious and unspeakably cruel, by which torture was inflicted upon innumerable victims during the Middle Ages. Consult: Jar dine, Reading on the Use of Torture in the Crimi nal Lou' of England (London. 18371 ; Lea, ,S'a perstition and Force (Philadelphia, 1566) ; and Stephen. History of the Criminal Law of Eng land (London, 1833).