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Updated: September 19, 2025
And this, a few hundred years earlier, would have been the natural and effective moment for the thumbscrews. I do not wish to be understood as defending these uncomfortable appliances. They would never have been needed to elicit information from me, for I should have spent my nights inventing matter to confess in the daytime.
"YOU have no right to be ignorant, at all events," said Bessie. "Why haven't I as good a right as anyone else?" "Because you have lived in the midst of all these things." "What things do you mean? Axes, and blocks, and thumbscrews?" "All these historical things. You belong to a historical family." "Bessie is really too historical," said Mrs. Westgate, catching a word of this dialogue.
He said that in such times as these every lover of liberty should go armed; that the age of trickery had come; that by trickery Louisianians had been sold, like cattle, to a nation of parvenues, to be dragged before juries for asserting the human right of free trade or ridding the earth of sneaks in the pay of the government; that laws, so-called, had been forged into thumbscrews, and a Congress which had bound itself to give them all the rights of American citizens sorry boon! was preparing to slip their birthright acres from under their feet, and leave them hanging, a bait to the vultures of the Américain immigration.
No member of the Convention of 1689 dreamed of proposing that the instrument which called the Prince and Princess of Orange to the throne should contain a declaration against the using of racks and thumbscrews for the purpose of forcing prisoners to accuse themselves.
They were examined there by masked magistrates who wrung the truth from them by the "bootikins," which squeezed the feet, or by the thumbscrews, which twisted the thumbs. My feet seemed to grow red-hot when I thought of that horror. I knew only too well that my youth would not save me. James the Second was never moved by pity towards a beaten enemy.
Ramblin' Peter had made a bold assault on a dragoon at the beginning of the fray, but could do nothing with his poor maimed hands, and was easily secured. "Let him taste the thumbscrews," growled Glendinning savagely, and pointing to Black. "Dae yer warst, ye born deevil," said Black recklessly for oppression driveth even a wise man mad. "Very good fetch the boot," said the sergeant.
But in the case of the Prussian tyranny, if it be tyranny at all, it is the whole point of its claim that it is not antiquated, but just going to begin, like the showman. Prussia has a whole thriving factory of thumbscrews, a whole humming workshop of wheels and racks, of the newest and neatest pattern, with which to win Europe back to reaction * infandum renovare dolorem.
The torment by fire, torture by water, rack and thumbscrews, pulley and wheel, the weights, the press, the glove and the boot, these the devices men hath schemed out for the plaguing of his neighbour, the hellish engines he hath troubled to invent and build for the crushing, twisting, tearing and maiming of his fellow-man, yet of all these devilish machines nought is there so constant, so pitiless and hard of endurance as the agony of suspense; there is a spectre mopping and mowing at our shoulder by day and haunting the misery of our nights; here is a disease slowly but surely sapping hope and courage and life itself.
Imagine our consternation when we discovered that the hatch covers were anything but water-tight, though we had insisted more upon this, perhaps, than upon any other detail. Loose boards, with cross-pieces, fastened with little thumbscrews there they were, ready to admit the water at the very first upset. There was nothing to be done.
"I have seen a little boy tortured with the thumbscrews, pricked with bayonets, and otherwise inhumanly treated because he would not, or could not, tell where his father was. I have seen a man hung up to a beam by his thumbs because he would not give up money which perhaps he did not possess.
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