Brutality

“ Torture-mongers vied with each other in running the gamut of brutality, while the populace, into whose hands the bodies of the hapless victims were delivered, would close in upon their prey, and would so mutilate them as to leave no trace of their original form. The executioners, though accustomed to their own gruesome task, would themselves be amazed at the fiendish cruelty of the populace. ”

“ Now, no man ever got to such a pitch of brutality at a first essay." And yet, what was all this, compared to his perversion of the only child his brutality had left me--oh! the black, fiendish cruelty of it! ”

“ Cruelty as fierce may indeed have been wreaked, and brutality as abominable been practised before, but never under like circumstances; rage of prolonged war, and resentment of prolonged oppression, have made men as cruel before now; and gradual decline into barbarism, where no examples of decency or civilization existed around them, has sunk, before now, isolated populations to the lowest level of possible humanity. ”

“ I know not when it will be, nor how; but one day or other, without any doubt, when brutality has bled itself to death in the excess of its fury, humanity will draw from the memory of their sufferings an invincible force for moral reparation. ”

“ Compared with the brutality of her armies in America, looking at her in the light of even a civilized nation, savage barbarity is thrown in the distance so far that it could not be seen through a microscope of a million power. ”

“ Accustomed to brutality and bestiality all their lives, it was easy for them to perpetrate the atrocities which startled the civilized foreign world, as they awakened the indignation of our own people. ”

“ The records of its abuse in the savage who loads women’s slender shoulders with his burdens, leaves his sick to the wayside jackal, and knocks his aged father on the head when he is past work; the brutality of slave-drivers, the iniquities of vice-maddened Eastern despots;—such things those who never have to deal with them may afford to forget. ”

“ Let us not glorify the brutality. The same strenuous endeavor, the same heroic self-sacrifice, the same fine courage and readiness to meet death, may be displayed without the accompaniment of killing our fellow men. ”

“ Existing social conditions favour the production of an infinite number of acts of violence, and there has been no hesitation in urging the workers not to refrain from brutality when this might do them service. ”

“ What strikes us in this judicial cruelty and in the joy the people felt at it, is eras brutality than perversity. Torture and executions are enjoyed by the spectators like an entertainment at a fair. The citizens of Mons bought a brigand, at far too high a price, for the pleasure of seeing him quartered, "at which the people rejoiced more than if a new holy body had risen from the dead." ”

“ I find that brutality interferes in most dramas and most lives. Brutality the male sin, disloyalty the female sin, — these two are always doing their best to baffle and blight heroism and purity. Often they succeed. Oftener they fail. And so the world exists, and is not annulled ”

“ Hell had freed from its chains all crimes, and let them out on the world to revel; therefore murder, pillage, perfidy, brutality, violence, robbery, frenzy, took the place of labor, uprightness, and conscience. ”

“ The dangerous classes of past times practised the simplest form of offence, that which was nearest to hand, that which is nowadays left to groups of young scoundrels without experience and without judgment. Offences of brutality seem to us nowadays something abnormal; so much so, that when the brutality has been great we often ask ourselves whether the culprit is in possession of all his senses. ”

“ It is now known, and every year sees the fact more generally acknowledged, that they were treated with a cruelty as unjust, unnecessary, and unwise as it was brutal. The brutality may be excused in part as the universal sin of the age. ”

“ Everybody agrees that the disappearance of these old brutalities is an excellent thing. From this opinion it was so easy to pass to the idea that all violence is an evil, that this step was bound to have been taken; and, in fact, the great mass of the people, who are not accustomed to thinking, have come to this conclusion, which is accepted nowadays as a dogma by the bleating herd of moralists. They have not asked themselves what there is in brutality which is reprehensible. ”

“ We see myriads of men banded together to practice open violation of the very [4] fundamental tenets of humanity; we see the worst passions of mankind, murder, theft, lust, arson, pillage—all the baser possibilities of human nature—coming to the surface. Outside of the natural killing of war, hundreds of men have been murdered, often with incidents of the most revolting brutality; children have been slaughtered; women have been outraged, killed and shamefully mutilated. ”

“ But the slaughterman's task is one of unrelieved, unmitigated brutality, involving the constant and systematic doing of deeds that are inhuman in themselves, degrading to the rough men who do them, and trebly disgraceful to the polite ladies and gentlemen at whose behest they are done. ”

“ It was, and is, essentially a measure of retaliation, compelled, if not justified, by the ferocious example of the red man. Brutality ever begets brutality; and magnanimity of arms can be only exercised in the case of a magnanimous foe. ”

“ But its attempts have done little, and cannot be expected to do much, because it is contrary to reason and experience to suppose that there can be any real check to brutality, consistent with leaving the victim still in the power of the executioner. ”

“ The reason of this is not far to seek—a reason which also obtained in the slave system. The most common and powerful impulse that drives an ordinary, well-meaning man to brutality is fear. Raise the cry of “Fire” in a crowded place, and many an excellent person will discard in the frantic moment every vestige of civilization. The elemental brute will emerge, and he will trample [Pg 136] down women and children, will perform almost any crime in the calendar in his mad rush for safety. ”

“ It was patent that this terrible man was no ignorant clod, such as one would inevitably suppose him to be from his exhibitions of brutality. At once he became an enigma. ”

“ We passed along through all the horrid varieties of misery, guilt, and riot that could find their place in a great public calamity; groups gazing in wo on the wreck of their fortunes in vapor and fire; groups plundering in the midst of the flame; crowds of rioters, escaped felons, and murderers, exulting in the public ruin, and dancing and drinking with Bacchanalian uproar; gangs of robbers stabbing the fugitives, to strip them; revenge, avarice, despair, profligacy, let loose naked; undisguised demons, to swell the wretchedness of this tremendous infliction upon a blood-covered empire. ”

“ Huge negroes, weltering in the heat, were interspersed among 'the lines;' hands crimson with murder rested upon the shoulders of beings young alike in years and crime; the victim of bestiality pressed against the heart-broken tool of the scathless villain; and all were blended in one revolting mass of trained soldiers of guilt; their thousand legs moving as the leg of one man: all in silence, save the peculiar sound of the sliding tread, grating not less upon the ear than the ground. ”

“ There falleth so continually before the eyes of our heart a fearful imagination of this terrible thing: his mighty strength and power, his high malice and hatred, and his incomparable cruelty, with robbing, spoiling, burning, and laying waste all the way that his army cometh; then, killing or carrying away the people thence, far from home, and there severing the couples and the kindred asunder, every one far from the other, some kept in thraldom and some kept in prison and some for a triumph tormented and killed in his presence ”

“ Some persons even, going still great and greater lengths in the iniquity and license of their barbarity, disdained all blunter weapons, and took up the most efficacious arms of all, fire and iron, and slew many with the sword, and destroyed not a few with flames. (68) And the most merciless of all their persecutors in some instances burnt whole families, husbands with their wives, and infant children with their parents, in the middle of the city, sparing neither age nor youth, nor the innocent helplessness of infants. ”

“ Our comrades had been slaughtered in a most inhuman and brutal manner, and slaves were trampling over their mangled and bleeding corpses. Revenge must have fired every heart, and strung every arm with nerves of steel, for the herculean task of blood. ”

“ The features of the men and women who composed this mob, rendered savage by want, suffering, and oppression, were distorted by hate, the desire for vengeance and lust for destruction, while they were lit up by the huge fierce flames which issued from the rapidly perishing but once magnificent building. ”

“ One needs only to glance at the history of warfare to observe that when the primitive emotions of anger and hatred are permitted full sway, men who have been considerate and thoughtful of their fellows and their fellows’ rights suddenly may turn into infuriated savages, slaughtering innocent women and children, mutilating the wounded, burning, ravaging, and looting, with all the wild fervor of demons. It is in such excesses of emotional turbulence that the most astonishing instances of prolonged exertion and incredible endurance are to be found. ”

“ The naked, strong body has known death, and sits in utter dejection, finished, hulked, a weight of shame. And what remains of life is in the face, whose expression is sinister and gruesome, like that of an unrelenting criminal violated by torture. The criminal look of misery and hatred on the fixed, violated face and in the bloodshot eyes is almost impossible. ”

“ They were strong men, but I was mad with rage, and that awful lust for slaughter which will creep into the hearts of the most civilised of us when blows are flying, and life and death tremble on the turn. ”

“ They kept the sufferer standing, and relieved each other in their cruel work of pinching, pricking, twitching, pulling with ropes, burning, suffocating with offensive fumes, until after successive days and nights of torture the victim was driven to madness, and to promise any thing to escape from his tormentors. ”

“ As might be suspected, seasoned as it was with such a population, drunkenness, debauchery, and murder walked abroad, hand in hand, day and night. Human life was valued no higher than the life of an ox or a hog, and the heart of the settlement was cold, and palsied to the most remote touch of feeling, and hardened to the recital of brutalities and crimes of the most indescribable enormity. Men talked of their evil doings, their deep, revolting guilt, with the most impudent freedom, and laughed and chuckled over them as though they were the best jokes in the world! ”

“ When attached to the stake, he looked round on his executioners, their instruments of torture, and the assembled multitude of spectators, with all the complacency of heroic fortitude; and, after enduring for some hours, with composed mien and triumphant language, a series of barbarities too atrocious and disgusting to be recited, his sufferings were terminated by the interposition of a French lady, who prevailed with the governor to order that mortal blow, to which human cruelty has given the name of coup de grace or stroke of favour. ”

“ As if by magic, the savages appeared at every point, yelling like demons of death, and slaughtering all they met. The men in the fields were killed with their own hoes and hatchets. Those in the houses were murdered on their own hearth-stones. So unlooked-for and terrible was the assault that in that day of blood three hundred and forty-seven men, women, and children fell victims to their merciless foes. ”

“ May the roar of Faction, thirsting for evil, never in this place be heard, nor the dust that drinks the dark blood of fellow-citizens bring to the State, from passion for revenge, the doom of retaliation. ”

“ The air echoes with the sound of the death-whoop, and of arms. The savage aspect of the combatants; their faces painted black and red, and some streaming with blood, and their frightful yells, make them appear like demons risen from the world beneath. The victims, too late aroused, spring from their fatal slumber, and foreseeing the dreadful fate which awaits them if taken prisoners, make almost superhuman struggles for deliverance. ”

“ But murder will out sooner or later,—'Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.' In spite of all their infernal cunning and midnight secresy, justice has overtaken these monsters, and never again may the annals of any age or nation be stained with such revolting criminality. ”

“ Vagabonds, paupers, fools, thieves, steward, chaplains, janitor, all is fish that comes to their net. The butchery lasts five days and nights without stopping. Massacre takes every form; some are drowned in the cellars, others shot in the courts. Water, fire, and sword, every sort of torture. ”

“ As if they had been desperate, they used violence against themselves, crying and shrieking piteously, tearing their flesh with their nails from their cheeks in a monstrous manner, the blood streaming down over their bodies. ”

“ In the fury and fire of partisan strife, and amid the familiar scenes of blood and death, men trampled upon right, crucified truth, murdered innocence, loved vengeance, despised virtue, abandoned principle, forgot their loves, left their dead unburied and their buried uncoffined, and hung upon the bloody war path like avenging furies. ”

“ Every old man and woman was killed, slain with a sword, or hacked to death, or speared. Babies, and little children were brained against the walls of the houses; strong men—fathers, lovers, sons—had been murdered with every wantonness of savagery conceivable. ”