flag. Custom, for them, had dissociated it time of life. In the great schools of Eng from disgrace. It was simply retribution. land birching has been freely dealt out by In civil life, however, to the grown man, it the best teachers, and it brings no shame, is and always was a mark of degradation in unless there be a want of pluck to stand it the eyes of the community. But as a pen bravely. alty for crime, it is a consequence of degra In Scotland whipping was strongly rec dation, rather than a cause of it. It was the ommended as the general punishment for crime that really degraded. juvenile offenders, in a Parliamentary Report The criminal dreads whipping mainly, as presented in 1895, by a Departmental Com the boy does, because it hurts. A French mittee appointed to consider the subject. physician at the head of the great prison In 1893. three hundred and thirty-five boys hospital at Toulon, in a work on the charac had been thus flogged instead of being sent teristics of convicts, has said that the aboli to jail; in 1804, two hundred and sixty-eight; tion of punishment accompanied by torture but the effect of this report was such that in has resulted in greatly augmenting the num 1898, there were four hundred and sixty-eight ber of homicides. A convict, whom he sentences to whipping and only three hun (¡notes, had been sentenced to fifty stripes. dred and thirty-eight to imprisonment, while "Ah," said the man, "that is worse than fifty there was a diminution of the total number strokes of the guillotine. One suffers dur of juvenile offenders convicted by one hun ing it, and after it, too." dred and seventy-eight. Let us admit that degraded as such a man Virginia, in 1898, reverted to a similar is by his brutal act and the brutal heart policy by a statute authorizing whipping to behind it, he is further degraded by the be substituted for fine or imprisonment, at whipping to which he may be sentenced. the discretion of the court, as the sentence So far as concerns his relations to his par upon a conviction for crime of any boy under ticular friends and associates, he ought to be, sixteen years of age, provided the consent and this, however we may deplore his fall in ot his parent or guardian be first given. Let any one familiar with the administra the eyes of the world at large, is a strong argument for the infliction of this particular tion of criminal justice, and desirous to make penalty. The social sting often goes deep it better, turn the light of his own experience est. A man hates to lose caste among those on this subject; and as he looks back on the with whom he associates familiarly. The monotonous routine of the police court, with term "jail-bird" shows how the community its sentence after sentence inflicted on the regards the man who has been once sen habitual rounder, to whom the jail has be tenced to imprisonment. But his mates come a home, he must see cause to consider often look upon him as none the worse for it. if one good whipping at the outset might not He has simply been unlucky. Let him be often have saved what has been not simply stripped and put under the lash, however, a wasted life, but a life that has wasted the and he sinks in their estimation. It may, property of the community and the peace of indeed, have another good tendency from the State. To replace whipping in the list of permis that very fact. It may drive him from out of their company, into that of honest men sible punishments would not, of course, in again. But, be this as it may, to flog one volve the restoration of the whipping post, criminal deters, by the very disgrace of it, nor is it a penalty appropriate to every case. Let it be inflicted in private, and, when upon hundreds from crime. grown men, for such offences only as involve To boys it could bring little of discredit the use or threat of great personal violence or disgrace. It is a remedy that the world or indignity to another; unless, as in India, has always recognized as belonging to their
