THE KNOUT.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 3076, 2 April 1892, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE KNOUT.

Many harrowing and graphic descriptions have "been written of the knout and its terrors from the imaginative point of view. In the dry light of nurgical realism the dread instrument of Russian torture in confessedly * dissapnintiriK,' as Mr Oscar Wilde once said of the Atlantic Ocean. Dr Benjamin Howard, tossed by a hurricane on the far distant island of Saghalien, became intimate wi-.h the officials in charge of tho penal settlement thero, and having witnessed tho administration af the maximum 100. has contributed to a medical journal some notes and observations on what he saw. It is an odd coincidence that a gentleman bearing the name of the great English prison philanthropist should in such a chance way have foitid an opportunity of witnessing for himself what so many others have had revealed to them by the powers of their imagination. Such a spectacle must necessarily be sickening and shocking. The knout as described by Dr Howard, is a terrible instrument, a short, thick handle, with a thong about twelve feet long'—a thoug of ' stout raw hide, which for the last four foet was in three tails, the terminal end of each being formed into a knot.' It seems surprising that any human being could receive 100 lashes from such an in9trn- ■ ment, wielded by a trained and muscular arm, and yet survive the ordeal. Tho English buigeon shows how life is preserved, and how it is from a medical stand , point that the physical results of ; ging in Siberia, disappointed him. Great care is taken to hit 110 vital part of the culprit, who is, moreover, as carefully ■watched by medical attendants as though lie were a patient under choloform ; his position, too, a horizontal ono, with the head lower than the heart and the part flogged, is dwelt upon as of great importance when the danger of death is from syncope After the flogging the culprit is tended in hospital with as great care and anxiety as if his terrible wounds had been received on the field of battle and in the cause of glory. Dr Howard, if we may siy so, was fortunate in the character of the man he saw flogged. No political offender ho, or sufferer for conscience sake, but a desperate assassin, originally exiled for several murders, and finally sent to Saghalien for having killed a woman who had befriended him in Siberia. In the absence of capital punishment the Russian officials had nothing to do with such a man but to flog him, and tho knowledge of tho fact that their own lives were in hourly jeopardy from such desperadoes must help them to regard the knout as not altogether an unnecessary evil. It is dreaded, at all events, by a class of criminals who, in Russia, would be absolutely incUfEerent to a death sentence. The stiTO of society which can

produce such monsters must, of course, be bad and rotten to the core, and thus evil grows upou evil until the State edifice is finally crowned by some terrible instrument of torture or form of imprisonment, indicated, perhaps, as essential, perhaps even as civilising. Wearo not, therefore, to be surprised if in a country like Russia the knout has its apologists and champions.