The Works of George W. M. Reynolds — page 104: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

NED RUSSELL 87 injunction, and the senior of the gendarmes made the exe- cutioner a sign to proceed. The punishment of the garrote can be explained in a few words. It consists of a collar of iron attached to a post, and so contrived as to tighten suddenly by the abrupt turning of ascrew. The windpipe is thereby instantaneously closed, and death quickly ensues. It is a hideous punishment, and yet perhaps is preferable to either hanging or beheading, for no blood is shed, neither are the spectators revolted by the three or four minutes’ duration of spasmodic convulsions and horrible writhings on the part of the victim. It must not be thought more painful than decapitation, while it is assuredly less so than death by the halter. Startling as the assertion may seem, it is nevertheless a fact that the head of a guillotined person lives for some seconds, perhaps even a minute, after it is severed from the trunk; while all the most excruciating and keenly agonizing sense of existence 1s con- centrated in the brain, until the nerves terminating there have ceased to throb and vibrate. As for hanging, the pro- tracted convulsions — lasting even, as above stated, for some minutes — testify to the extent of the horrific agony endured. But in respect to the garrote, it is easy to compre- hend how the sudden compressure of the windpipe in so violent a manner produces an almost instantaneous numb- ness or absence of feeling, in the midst of which life passes away. At all events, it is tolerably certain that this last- named mode of capital execution must be less painful as well as shorter than that of the other two, for the reasons set forth. All three are hideous, abominable, satanic. The punishment of death is a remnant of barbaric cruelty still lingering amidst our modern civilization; it is an atrocity which the good feeling and the good sense of the masses would abolish in a moment if they had the power, but which is maintained in spite of them by kings and aristocrats the better to enforce those savage laws which prevent society from making that rapid progress which, if it had its full play, would quickly abrogate royalties and patrician orders. But to return to the scene in the great square of the Catalonian capital. Ned Russell — his arms closely pin- ioned — was seated upon the stool; the executioner had. received the sign to finish the proceeding without delay, and the doomed man was made to place his back completely CONnNIEDOOKS (EO)