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This reads very much like a description of the torments of the Inquisition. The Moors may have imported this system of torture from Spain. Similar barbarities were said to have been inflicted by King Otho on prisoners in Greece, even on British Ionian subjects! I recollect particularly the sewing up of fierce cats in the petticoats of women.
The Sultan was responsible, for these barbarities were not the act of the criminal class, such as afflicts every country, the malefactors who usually perpetrate horrible crime, but were perpetrated by the agents of the Sultan the soldiers and the Kurds, tax-gatherers and police of the Turkish Government.
Alas! my son, you have in your books read of many bad women, who have occasioned great mischief, and I will not excuse them: but you do not consider how many monarchs, sultans, and other princes there have been in the world, whose tyrannies, barbarities, and cruelties astonish those that read of them, as well as myself.
Then there is the "Indian Hater," a numerous and respectable body of men, to be found upon the frontier settlements, who, from having suffered in their persons and property by the barbarities and plunder of the Indians, have come at length to look upon them as no better than the wild beasts of the forest, and whose many atrocities make it a moral duty, on the part of the whites, to exterminate by fire and the sword.
Whether it was that they were inflamed by the fearful and wholesale barbarities enforced by Ferdinand and the Inquisition against their tribe, or whether they were stirred up by one of their own order, in whom was recognised the head of their most sacred family; or whether, as is most probable, both causes combined certain it is, that they manifested a feeling that was thoroughly unknown to the ordinary habits and policy of that peaceable people.
I shuddered with greater horror than ever as the latter possibility occurred to me, for I had not lived nearly sixteen years in South Africa without hearing something of the unspeakable barbarities inflicted by the savages upon those unhappy beings who chanced to be taken alive in battle by them.
As it is, with all his astrology, and all his alchemy, and all his barbarities of form and expression, I for one will always take sides with the author of The Serious Call, and The Spirit of Prayer, and The Spirit of Love, and The Way to Divine Knowledge, in the disputed matter of Jacob Behmen's sanity and sanctity; and I will continue to believe that if I had only had the scholarship, and the intellect, and the patience, and the enterprise, to have mastered, through all their intricacies, the Behmenite grammar and the Behmenite vocabulary, I also would have found in Behmen all that Freher and Pordage and Law and Walton found.
The records of many of them are filled with tragic scenes of violence and crime. To maintain their hated rule, they were impelled to the practice of barbarities hardly ever surpassed. CONDOTTIERI. With the end of the civil wars, there appear "the companies of adventure," or mercenary troops. The burghers, having put down the nobility and achieved their independence, lay aside their arms.
In its turn natural courage would sometimes take its place, and then I would be talking myself up to vigorous resolutions; that I would not be taken to be barbarously used by a parcel of merciless wretches in cold blood; that it were much better to have fallen into the hands of the savages, though I were sure they would feast upon me when they had taken me, than those who would perhaps glut their rage upon me by inhuman tortures and barbarities; that in the case of the savages, I always resolved to die fighting to the last gasp, and why should I not do so now?
Is it then necessary to remind you of the barbarities they have practised upon our brethren, who have struggled and died for the faith?
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