In the admirable liturgy of the churches of England and of Rome, there is a fervent prayer for protection against “battle, murder, and sudden death.” From death uncontemplated, unarranged, unprepared for, may Heaven in mercy deliver us! But if ever ready, as we should be for the inevitable event, the most kindly mode of infliction must surely be that which is most prompt and brief. To die unconsciously, as in sleep, or by apoplexy, or lightning, or overwhelming violence, as in the catastrophe of the Princeton, this is the true Euthanasia. “Cæsar,” says Suetonius, “finem vitæ commodissimum, repentinum inopinatumque pretulerat.” Montaigne, who quotes this, renders it, “La moins préméditée et la plus courte.” “Mortes repentinæ,” reasons Pliny, “hoc est summa vitæ felicitas.” “Emori nolo,” exclaims Cicero, “sed me esse mortuum nihil estimo.”
Sufferers by various modes of execution were often, in the good old times of our merciless ancestors, denied as long as possible the privilege of dying, and the Indians of our continent utter a fiendish howl of disappointment when a victim thus prematurely escapes from their ingenious malignity. The _coup de grace_ was a boon unspeakably desired by the poor wretch broken on the wheel, or stretched upon the accursed cross, and forced to linger on with mangled and bleeding limbs, amidst all the cruel torments of thirst and fever, through hours and even days that must have seemed interminable.
The progress of civilization, and a more enlightened humanity have put an end to all these atrocities, and substituted the gallows, the garrote, and the guillotine, which inflict deaths so sudden that many have questioned whether they necessarily imply any consciousness of physical suffering. These are, however, by no means the most instantaneous modes of putting an end to life and its manifestations. In the hanged, as in the drowned, and otherwise suffocated, there is a period of uncertainty, during which the subject is, as we know, recoverable; we dare not pronounce him insensible. He who has seen an ox “pithed” in the slaughter-house, or a game-cock in all the flush and excitement of battle “gaffed” in the occiput or back of the neck, will contrast the immediate stiffness and relaxation of the flaccid body with the prolonged and convulsive struggles of the decapitated bird, with a sort of curious anxiety to know how long and in what degree sensibility may linger in the head and in the trunk when severed by the sharp axe. The history of the guillotine offers many incidents calculated to throw a doubt on the subject, and the inquiries of Seguret and Sue seem to prove the existence of post-mortem passion and emotion.