Punishment of Bankrupts.

Cromwell Argus, Volume III, Issue 145, 20 August 1872, Page 7

Punishment of Bankrupts.

A paper entitled "The Curiosities of the Carnival" is published in the Cornhttl for February, and is very interesting. Here is the way in which certain crimes, now punishable either by imprisonment or else by public censure, were dealt with in days of yore :-—" The Carnival was the season in which our ancestors delighted to expose those traders who used light weights and short measures, or who adulterated their goods. They clapped such worthies in a cart and marched them round the parish, exposed to volleys of sarcasm and decayed vegetables. In Italy measures dissimilar were resorted to with another class of commercial defaulters. Those who have visited that country will probably remember the ' stones of infamy' which are still to be seen in many of its cities. In Venice such a stone stands near the church of St. Malo ; while in Verona, as well as in Florence, it is placed in the old market. On a certain day during the carnival those traders who had become bankrupt during the preceding year were led to this stone. Around them were gathered a vast mob, wherein the schoolboys were accorded the foremost rank, for the ceremony was supposed to inculcate a lesson in commercial morality very suitable to their years. Unlike most other lessons of a moral stamp, it was one which no schoolboy was ever known to neglect. One by one the bankrupts were placed on the centre of the stone to hear the reading of their balancesheet, and to endure as many reproaches as their creditors could cram into a limited time. That scolding five minutes formed a comedy in itself; the gestures and fistifications—we fe '1 compelled to coin the word—were studies; as for the speaking part, it was a storm of interjection in which nothing was distinct. When the time was up, the presiding official rouched his bell, and all became dumb. The b mkrupt was solemnly divested of a necessuy portion of his dress, after which three stout public officers laid hold of his shoulders, and three others of his knees, and, raising him every time as high as they could, bumped him deliberately twelve times against the cold stone in honour of the twelve apostles, to the disgust of the patient, and the intense delight of the rising generation."