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Updated: June 4, 2025
"What an imagination!" exclaimed Roger. "Dear child, you have let it carry you away as far from the truth as you've carried this woman from her home this woman whom you've so audaciously kidnapped." "Wait," said Virginia, her voice trembling. "I haven't done with her. This is only the first turn of the thumbscrew. She doesn't dream yet of the ordeal she'll have to go through."
No class of men mentioned in history has ever adhered to a principle with more inflexible pertinacity than was found among the Scotch Puritans. Fine and imprisonment, the sheers and the branding iron, the boot, the thumbscrew, and the gallows could not extort from the stubborn Covenanter one evasive word on which it was possible to put a sense inconsistent with his theological system.
On one side were the massive doors studded with rusty knobs, of airless cells; on the rough, spider-webbed wall opposite, against which leaned an iron ladder, were fixed iron rings at varying heights. A thumbscrew stood in the corner, and in the centre was a small writing-table, at which the judge seated himself.
The old barons of the middle ages used, in general, the thumbscrew to extort property; we moderns use, in preference, hunger or domestic affliction: but the fact of extortion remains precisely the same.
Your objection has in it the spirit of hate and intolerance. Of that spirit the inquisition was born. That spirit lighted the fagot, made the thumbscrew, put chains upon the limbs, and lashes upon the backs of men. The same spirit bought and sold, captured and kidnapped human beings; sold babes, and justified all the horrors of slavery. Congress has nothing to do with the religion of the people.
Whereon the bloated tyrant sent his praetorians, and enforced payment by scourge and thumbscrew? Not in the least. From all which facts they are Mr. Hallam's, not Mr. Froude's we can deduce not tyranny, but lenity, good sense, and the frank withdrawal from a wrong position as soon as the unwillingness of the people proved it to be a wrong one.
Some died in imprisonment; some were beheaded; some suffered for their crimes; some were innocent, but suffered because they had aroused the anger of a jealous king. Some went into those walls to suffer tortures worse than death tortures of the thumbscrew and rack, to make them betray the names of their companions.
Griffin arrested him, and he came hastily back; for, although it would have required a thumbscrew to have made him confess it, yet he had all day long looked forward to the time of parting, when he half expected Emanuel Griffin, Esq., contrary to his custom though it was, would offer him some little gift out of the increased profits of a business he had done no little to advance.
Just as he was getting back into his buggy John rode up, flanked by a bodyguard of friends; John was galloping from booth to booth, to verify progress and put the thumbscrew on wobblers. He beamed as well he might. He was certain to be one of the two members elected, and quite likely to top the poll by a respectable majority.
The man would be glad to submit, for the sake of peace in his household. I often sigh for the good old days of the Inquisition; but it's still possible, in the blessed seclusion of the family circle, to apply the rack and the thumbscrew in a modified form.
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