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Updated: May 23, 2025
"This is the latest method, an official taster having been formerly employed, but owing to the exorbitant rate of insurance on such officers and the rapid decimation of the royal retinue, that plan was recently abandoned.
Such a population would give probably 170,000 men capable of bearing arms, and therefore the number of soldiers sent had already amounted to more than a decimation of the available strength of the State. When we were at Dubuque, nothing was talked of but the army. It seemed that mines, coal-pits, and corn-fields were all of no account in comparison with the war.
There Antony, finding that his men had in a panic deserted the defense of the mound, upon a sally of the Medes, resolved to proceed against them by decimation, as it is called, which is done by dividing the soldiers into tens, and, out of every ten, putting one to death, as it happens by lot. The rest he gave orders should have, instead of wheat, their rations of corn in barley.
The prisoners overpowered the guards and escaped on one occasion, but were overtaken by Mexican cavalry while dying of thirst in a desert. Santa Anna ordered their "decimation," which meant that every tenth man was shot, their lot being determined by the drawing of a black bean from an earthen pot containing a certain proportion of white ones. "Big-foot" drew a white one.
Nor did statesman ever before expect a vast income from the commerce of a nation devoted to almost universal massacre. During the daily decimation of the people's lives, he thought a daily decimation of their industry possible.
The middle classes, being mostly engaged in peaceful pursuits, suffered less of this decimation of their finest young men; and to that fact I attribute much of their increasing preponderance, social, political, and intellectual, to this very day.
The resentments of castes the abolished forms of worship the decimation of property the extirpated abuses the humiliated aristocracies all are lost in the thundering sound of the overthrow of ancient ideas and things. On whom can we demand revenge? The nation answers for all to all, and no man has aught to require from it.
Day in, day out, at home and abroad, this ceaseless drain of men, linking hands in the decimation of the fleet with those able adjutants Disease and Death, accentuated progressively and enormously the naval needs of the country.
In the case of Italy the decimal system pervaded all the earliest arrangements: it may be sufficient to recall the number ten so usual in the case of witnesses, securities, envoys, and magistrates, the legal equivalence of one ox and ten sheep, the partition of the canton into ten curies and the pervading application generally of the decurial system, the -limitatio-, the tenth in offerings and in agriculture, decimation, and the praenomen -Decimus-. Among the applications of this most ancient decimal system in the sphere of measuring and of writing, the remarkable Italian ciphers claim a primary place.
I never, myself, saw the treatment described in the preceding paragraph, but have heard it described by persons who have witnessed it. The decimation among the Indians I knew of personally, and the hospital, established for their benefit, was a Hudson's Bay building not a stone's throw from my own quarters.
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