(1) The other day I, the Empress Dowager, being touched with pity at the want of merey exercised in the case of robbers captured for their crimes, whereby all were summarily decapitated without any distinction being made between chief and followers, commanded the Grand Council to deliberate over this matter with the officers of the Triple Judiciary—Presidents of the Board of Punishments, Court of Censors, and Board of Revision—and to report to us the result, of their conference. Their report is now before me, in which Prince Li—President of the Grand Council—and his co-memorialists. state that "'the rule of executing robbers who have obtained pillage without any. distinction made between chief and followers was the last resort of the law, compelled so to do in consequence of the multiplicity and constant recurrence of cases of robbery und pillage. Even now the law shows extra leniency to that member of a robber band who does not join his companions in making a raid, and also to that member who, although abstaining from joining, gets his share of the divided spoils. There is no truth in the assertion that all members of a gang of robbers are equally executed. Asa matter of fact if local authorities would only exercise due care and detail in trying a case of robbery, they could easily make a distinction in the various stages of guilt of their prisoners and give sentence thereby. There would then be no more complaints against wholesale executions. With reference, however, to the sentence of wholesale decapitations, this law was made only as a temporary measure; it is not a fixed inw at all, The trouble is that provincial officials, being of a lazy disposition and hating to be bored with long drawn out and careful investigations, seize upon the temporary regulation in order to get rid of the whole pecele cheaper than straw effigies." affair at one stroke, valuing the lives of the
hereby command that, with the exception of those provinces where there is fighting now going on, and where there is no doubt in the least that the prisoners caught are insurgents, mounted bandits, members of secret societies and disbanded soldiers, whose crimes are graver and more serious and who therefore should be summarily decapitated—a temporary but necessary law—other cases amongst the masses, relating to robbery with arms in hand, shall hereafter be tried and dealt with in accordance to the old written law, in order that due mercy and leniency be shown to the less guilty.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.