Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 14.pdf/585

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538
The Green Bag.

All concerned in highway robbery meet with the charges are true or not. A parent, the same death. Kidnapping by stratagem • grandparent or husband may escape all punishment by voluntary surrender. De is punished by one hundred blows and banish ment to a distance of three thousand li (about capitation is the penalty for forging a seal, three hundred and seventy-one miles). The issuing a spurious edition of the Imperial opener of a buried coffin is put to death. Almanac, or passing off as a Government Actual theft is carefully defined. Money official; strangulation for counterfeiting com and easily portable articles must have been mon coin of the realm and committing rape removed from the place where found, with (age limit twelve years). Gambling is pun ished by eighty blows and forfeiture of the the exception of jewels, etc. : mere posses sion of these is equivalent to theft. Large stakes. Still, a few friends at a private articles must have been placed in a cart, or on house may play quietly for food and drink. the back of an animal, horses and cattle taken If arson results in the death of any one by out of the stable. For unsuccessful attempt burning, the penalty is death. There are to murder, without wounds, the penalty is administered forty blows for setting fire to one's own house. The law is disregarded one hundred blows and three years' banish which forbids the representation on public ment. A son may kill on the spot the mur derer of his father or mother. Again, a or private stages of " emperors, empresses, husband may kill on the spot his adulterous famous princes and ministers and generals wife or her paramour, — but not at a later of former ages, etc., . . . nevertheless it is not time. If a physician violates the rules of intended by this law to prohibit the exhibi medicine in his practice, and a patient dies tion upon the stage of fictitious characters of under the treatment, the physician in ques just and upright men, of chaste wives, and tion loses his head. There is also decapita pious and obedient children, all of which may tion in store for a slave who designedly tend to dispose the minds of the spectators to strikes his master. If a wife strikes her virtue." There are elaborate laws pertain husband, she is bambooed a hundred times ing to the arrest, trial and execution of pris and her husband is compelled to divorce her; oners. Constables are punished for failing but if a husband strikes his wife, there is no to recover stolen property or to produce punishment, unless an open wound results. thieves. Women are not to go to prison If the wife dies of a beating, her husband is except in capital cases, or for adultery. And lictors are not to inflict blows with great strangled. Every prosecutor must begin by filing a noise and little pain! Book VII. relates entirely to public works. charge at the lowest tribunal of justice within the district, under a penalty of fifty blows. There are regulations for the preservation of Filing a false charge is punished somewhat public buildings, high roads and bridges, and more heavily than the accused would have for the prevention of floods by the mainte been punished. The authors of anonymous nance of durable embankments along the charges are liable to strangulation, whether shores of rivers.