SERJEANT ADAMS ON A KNOTTY POINT.
Mr. Serjeant Adams occasionally makes sensible remarks. In the course of the other day, for instance, alluding to some misrepresentation of his opinions on the system of flogging, which had got abroad, he is reported to have said that
"He had for years watched the progress of that system, and had had ample opportunities of doing so, on account of so many children tried before him; and he had so frequently found that the commencement of a child's criminal history was with three days' imprisonment and a whipping, and after that beginning the child so constantly came back to this court, that his mind quite revolted from passing a sentence involving whipping at all."
"Give a young thief a whipping, and have done with him," is a very common prescription of Common Sense for the cure of juvenile delinquency. Common Sense, however, sometimes jumps to conclusions which are not verified. Common Sense uttered predictions concerning gas and steam, which have not come to pass. And the views of Common Sense concerning discipline for youthful offenders are perhaps rather too summary. "Give the young thief a whipping"—very good. The thing is done with small expenditure of time and material. It does not take many minutes: it is attended only with a slight wear of whipcord: cost you a farthing, as Mr. Pepys would have said: and a certain laceration of human integument, cost you absolutely nothing. You lose nothing whatever in raw material. Therefore inflict the whipping on the young thief. And have done with him? Ah! "If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly." But it appears that you won't have done with him. On the contrary, after that beginning, the child constantly comes back to this court, as Assistant-Judge Adams says. After all, is it not manifest even to Common Sense—if Common Sense will exert itself—that to attempt the reformation of a child—and for what else would you punish a child?—by whipping him, is really beginning at the wrong end? The application of the scourge belongs to the operative part—the surgery—of the treatment of criminals; and operations should be resorted to only when all other remedies have failed. Primarily, the whip lacerates the skin; but the laceration is succeeded by hardening of the part that was lacerated; but not only by that: by the induration, also, of any amount of heart that the patient may previously have been endowed with. After such a beginning, no wonder that he comes back to this court or that. No: the lash is a valuable application, so is lunar caustic, so is lapis infernalis, or the actual cautery itself. But reserve it for desperate cases. Resort to it only in those of subjects that have lost all sensibility to every other appeal. Keep stripes for the ruffian who savagely maltreats his wife; for the hopeless brute, for the irreclaimable blackguard. And administer them to him in such a dose that he will not readily come back to any court to have it repeated. But a little whipping is a dangerous thing. It degrades and brutalises without subduing. You must lash a human being like a hound if you want to conquer him as you would conquer a hound—and it surely would be rather too severe to carry flagellation to that extent with juvenile offenders. It is not fair, moreover, to use the rod till you have first tried the schoolmaster.