Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 December 1896 — SPAIN’S HELLISH TORTURE. [ARTICLE]

SPAIN’S HELLISH TORTURE.

Skinned Men Alive to Make Execution Drama, The methods by which Spain conducts “warfare” In Cuba and the Philippine Islands are more or less familiar to Globe readers, owing to the accounts so often appearing In this paper; and we now give an account, taken from Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, of her manner of conducting war In the Netherlands 300 years ago. It will be seen at a glance that much of her barbarism and Inhuman cruelty still remain with her. Says Motley; “No mode In which human beings have ever caused their fel- ' low creatures to suffer was omitted t from dally practice. Men, women and children, old and young, nobles and 1; paupers, opulent burghers, hospital pa ; tlents. lunatics, dead bodies, all were Indiscriminately made to furnish food for the scaffold and the stake. Men were tortured, beheaded, hanged by the neck and by the legs, burned before slow tires, pinched to death with redbot tongs, broken upon the wheel, starved and flayed alive. Their skins, stripped from the living body, were stretched upon drums to be beaten in the march of their brethren to the gallows. The additional barbarities committed during the sack and ruin of those blazing and starving cities are almost beyond belief, and whole populations were burn ed and hacked to pieces by soldiers in every mode which cruelty in Its wanton ingenuity could devise. Such was the administration of which Vargas (a no ble Spaniard in high authority) affirm ed that too much mercy had been Its ruin.”