Country, where the Three Estates sit all under one Three-cornered
Hat, and the debates are kept silent, and only the upshot of them,
more or less faithfully, is made public),--by Cabinet Order,
3d June, 1740, he abolishes the use of Torture in Criminal Trials.
[Preuss, Friedrichs Jugend und Thronbesteigung italic> (Berlin, 1840,--a minor Book of Preuss's), p. 340.
Rodenbeck, i. 14 ("3d June").] Legal Torture, "Question" as they
mildly call it, is at an end from this date. Not in any Prussian
Court shall a "question" try for answer again by that savage
method. The use of Torture had, I believe, fallen rather obsolete
in Prussia; but now the very threat of it shall vanish,--the
threat of it, as we may remember, had reached Friedrich himself,
at one time. Three or four years ago, it is farther said, a dark
murder happened in Berlin: Man killed one night in the open
streets; murderer discoverable by no method,--unless he were a
certain CANDIDATUS of Divinity to whom some trace of evidence
pointed, but who sorrowfully persisted in absolute and total
denial. This poor Candidatus had been threatened with the rack;
and would most likely have at length got it, had not the real
murderer been discovered,--much to the discredit of the rack in
Berlin. This Candidatus was only threatened; nor do I know when
the last actual instance in Prussia was; but in enlightened
France, and most other countries, there was as yet no scruple upon
it. Barbier, the Diarist at Paris, some time after this, tells us
of a gang of thieves there, who were regularly put to the torture;
and "they blabbed too, ILS ONT JASE," says Barbier with official
jocosity. [Barbier, Journal Historique du Regne de Louis
XV. (Paris, 1849), ii. 338 (date "Dec. 1742").]

Friedrich's Cabinet Order, we need not say, was greeted