1st, 1867.
-- The analogy of a commander in active service is inadequate.
Elizabeth, Burghley, Walsingham, were not commanders on active service; and if they had been, they would have had no right, on any Christian or civilised principle, to torture prisoners.

Unless the end justifies the means, in which case there is no morality, the rack was an abomination, and those who applied it to extort either confession or evidence debased themselves to the level of the Holy Inquisitors.

Froude did not, I grieve to say, stop at an apology for the rack.

In a passage which must always disfigure his book he thus describes the fate of Antony Babington and those who suffered with him in 1586.

"They were all hanged but for a moment, according to the letter of the sentence, taken down while the susceptibility of agony was still unimpaired, and cut in pieces afterwards with due precautions for the protraction of the pain.