The Delinquent (Vol. IV, No. 1), January, 1914

Cover image is created by transcriber using the title page and placed in the public domain.
By Charles R. Miller, Governor of Delaware
Delaware has whipped criminals of certain types since 1656, and will continue to whip them until the statutes under which corporal punishment is indicted shall be repealed.
Congress cannot, and certainly will not, interfere in the exercise of proper authority under the law, and as the whipping post is an integral part of the criminal law of Delaware every law officer must consent to its use regardless of any personal views he may have in the matter. Hysterical women, weak men, bullies, cranks and blackguards in all parts of the country have written to me demanding that I set aside the law and prohibit whippings for crime in Delaware. These good souls give no heed to the fact that the whippings are quite as legal in Delaware as imprisonment. Their demands amount to anarchy, so far as law enforcement goes. They cry, “Down with the law!” without knowing whereof they speak.
I want every criminal, every sharper and every moral leper to know that if he comes to Delaware and violates the law he will not only serve a long term in our none too comfortable jails, but that he will be whipped in public on his bare back before he enters his cell. I wish this fact could be spread to the uttermost corners of the country.
Delaware wants no undesirable citizen. This State offers nothing but the whip and the workhouse for the gunmen, white slavers, panders, highwaymen and common thieves which people the underworld of some of our larger cities and who seem to get a certain amount of applause for their more daring performances from the same type of people who demand that I shall set aside a fundamental law of my State and defy the decrees of our High Court.
Delaware houses one-half of her population in the city of Wilmington. All the rest of the State is strictly rural. Our people are of the soil. They are typical farmers—plain, wholesome, God-fearing people who obey the law and who punish crime with severity. We have neither the means nor the machinery with which to patrol our rural districts with armed officers. It follows, then, that we must have laws carrying severe penalties and rigidly enforce them.