"Pooh! pooh! my good sir. Don't tell me. Never saw flogging in the navy do good. Kept down brutes; never made a man yet."—Dr. Norman Macleod in Good Words.
If school-masters must flog, let them flog their own sons.
If they must ruin the tempers, the dispositions, and the
constitutions of boys, they have more right to practice
upon their own than on other people's children! Oh that
parents would raise—and that without any uncertain
sound—their voices against such abominations, and the
detestable cane would soon be banished the school-room!
"I am confident that no boy," says Addison, "who will
not be allured by letters without blows, will never be
brought to anything with them. A great or good mind
must necessarily be the worst for such indignities; and
it is a sad change to lose of its virtue for the improvement
of its knowledge. No one has gone through what they
call a great school, but must have remembered to have
seen children of excellent and ingenuous natures (as have
afterward appeared in their manhood). I say, no man has
passed through this way of education but must have seen
an ingenuous creature expiring with shame, with pale
looks, beseeching sorrow, and silent tears, throw up its
honest eyes, and kneel on its tender knees to an inexorable
blockhead, to be forgiven the false quantity of a word in
making a Latin verse. The child is punished, and the
next day he commits a like crime, and so a third, with the
same consequence. I would fain ask any reasonable man
whether this lad, in the simplicity of his native innocence,
full of shame, and capable of any impressions from that
grace of soul, was not fitted for any purpose in this life
than after that spark of virtue is extinguished in him,
though he is able to write twenty verses in an evening?"
How often is corporal punishment resorted to at school because the master is in a passion, and he vents his rage upon the poor school-boy's unfortunate back!
