et boiling, on judicious
principles; the hum of those old women's spindles in the warm rooms:
gods and men are well pleased to hear such sounds; and accept the same
as part, real though infinitesimally small, of the sphere-harmonies of
this Universe!

ABOLITION OF LEGAL TORTURE.

Friedrich makes haste, next, to strike into Law-improvements. It is but
the morrow after this of the Corn-magazines, by KABINETS-ORDRE (Act
of Parliament such as they can have in that Country, where the Three
Estates sit all under one Three-cornered Hat, and the debates are kept
silent, and only the upshot of them, more or less faithfully, is made
public),--by Cabinet Order, 3d June, 1740, he abolishes the use
of Torture in Criminal Trials. [Preuss, _Friedrichs Jugend und
Thronbesteigung_ (Berlin, 1840,--a minor Book of Preuss's), p. 340.
Rodenbeck, i. 14 ("3d June").] Legal Torture, "Question" as they mildly
call it, is at an end from this date. Not in any Prussian Court shall
a "question" try for answer again by that savage method. The use of
Torture had, I believe, fallen rather obsolete in Prussia; but now the
very threat of it shall vanish,--the threat of it, as we may remember,
had reached Friedrich himself, at one time. Three or four years ago, it
is farther said, a dark murder happened in Berlin: Man killed one night
in the open streets; murderer discoverable by no method,--unless he were
a certain CANDIDATUS of Divinity to whom some trace of evidence pointed,
but who sorrowfully persisted in absolute and total denial. This poor
Candidatus had been threatened with the rack; and would most likely have
at length got it, had not the real murderer been discovered,--much
to the discredit of the rack in Berlin. This Candidatus was only
threatened; nor do I know when the last actual instance in Prussia was;
but in enlightened France, and most other countries, there was as yet
no scruple upon it. Barbier, the Diarist at Paris, some time after
this, tells us of a gang of thieves there, who were regularly put to
the torture; and "they blabbed too, ILS ONT JASE," says Barbier with
official jocosity. [Barbier, _Journal Historique du Regne de Louis XV._
(Paris, 1849), ii. 338 (date "Dec. 1742").]

Friedrich's Cabinet Order, we need not say, was greeted everywhere, at
home and abroad, by three rounds of applause;--in which surely all of
us still join; though the PER CONTRA also is becoming visible to some
of us, and our enthusiasm grows less