I am told that hospitals, jails, almshouses and insane-asylums are for people who are unable to care for themselves properly. Therefore, they are sent to these places, where men and women, specially delegated, spend their lives looking after them. ¶ So it seems that the incompetent, in addition to not adding to the wealth of the world, actually take competent people from a world of usefulness to minister to them. After a few years as a guard, the man is quite as incompetent as are the prisoners—and more so—because the prisoner works and the guard does nothing but guard. ¶ And for the man who works there is a chance; but the man who doesn’t is damned, body and soul. Hospitals, prisons and poorhouses are places where people live who can’t or won’t work. These places do not cure our bodily or social ills—they are palliatives, all. They do not prevent incompetence nor stop the production of the weak and incompetent. Every year we have to pull down our hospitals and build greater. Ben Lindsey, Luther Burbank, John Davey, Horace Fletcher, all men essentially of one type, are working to shut off the regular annual crop of criminals ❦ Preachers have preached their silly tales of where we came from and where we are going to, directing the attention of men from this world to another, and with myth, miracle, mystery—with dead languages, dead ideas and dead formulas—have scared the world stiff. That’s why we are sick. ¶ We have bred from the worst in the worst possible way, under the worst conditions ❦ We have it thundered at us from a million pulpits that the indissoluble marriage-tie was a sacred scheme, devised by God Almighty, who also provided that women shall be incarcerated in a kitchen. The result has been the doormat wife, with a liar for a husband—for men lie only to inferiors and tyrants—and a brood of legitimate candidates for hospitals, poorhouses and prisons. ¶ Christianity was absolutely supreme for a thousand years. Did she abolish poverty, disease and crime? Not exactly—these things increased under Christian rule. And Religion is not yet willing to step aside and give Science a chance ❦ Revivalists get a thousand children in a room and play on their nervous sensibilities in the name of the Gentle Christ, and then the doctors vaccinate them with pus from diseased animals, and we wonder why they die or go insane! The Clerics killed Ferrer because he was working to make men free. ¶ Freedom means responsibility. And responsibility means the making of decisions. By deciding for ourselves we grow, and this exercise of the will in deciding what is best to do and doing it is the only method of attaining growth known in Nature. But woman’s decisions have been made for her by male man, and so low has she sunk that millions of women are willing that this should continue. The passion for freedom is Nature’s cry for growth. ¶ A judge of the Supreme Court of the State of New York once said to me: “Divorce should be as free as marriage, and if it were, there would be no more separations than there are now. We give men and women the right to put their heads into a noose, but decline to let them pull their heads out. Those whom God hath joined together no man can put asunder. Also, the word ‘illegitimate’ should be stricken from the judicial record, forever. An act may be illegitimate, but a child, never.” ¶ “Why don’t you talk like this in public?” I asked. And the answer was, “If I did, I’d lose my job inside of twenty-four hours.” “Well,” I said, “I’ll say it for you.” “If you do and mention my name I’ll—but, say, you will not, you must not quote me. You can agitate—I can only conform ❦ We are ruled by the archaic. You are working to make men free, and only a free people can be a healthy, happy, virtuous, self-reliant and competent people. Keep ’er going, but on your life, don’t quote me. Here’s two dolodocci to renew my subscription to The Fra.”
Corporal Punishment
Children’s diseases are a logical result of children’s beatings ❦ To shock, pain, grieve, anger or violently suppress a human being is to run a grave risk of lowering that individual’s physical vitality to a point where the person is an easy prey for any disease that happens along. That which interferes with the vital functions, even in a transient way, is not wise nor good. ¶ Extreme anger is apt to be followed by lassitude or some marked physical disturbance. In fact, it is well known that hate secretes a toxin which manifests itself in the breath, and in the tissues ❦ What we call a disease is a symptom of vitality decreased to a point where the forces of dissolution are active. A shock which will blanch the cheek disturbs the circulation, and interferes with the digestion. ¶ Perhaps the whipping did not mutilate, but it angered and shocked until a fever followed. Dyspepsia is a matter of the nerves. Much of our bad theology, if we could trace it, would be found to have its rise in indigestion. And that it has caused pathological disturbances of countless varieties, from catarrh to acute mania, is known to every thinking physician. ¶ And of all causes of sickness, I know of none that has borne a greater crop of cosmic cockleburs than the old-time plan of whipping children. When Solomon put forth that unwise saying, “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” an extent of harm was done the human race that no pen can compute. That one statement should have convinced every intelligent person that the Bible was just like every other book—good and bad in spots. If accepted literally, the Bible is an atrocious book, false, obscene and misleading, tending to insanity, disease and death. Fortunately, we are now allowed to take the Bible as the garbled literature of a barbaric and superstitious past, collected from many sources, and good and bad, wise and silly, sublime and vicious—all as the case may be. ¶ That millions of parents have bolstered their brutal tendency to punish and inflict pain by that remark about sparing the rod, every one knows. And always the tendency to beat the little thing, too weak to strike back, was more to ease the feelings of the parent than to improve and benefit the child. Moreover, it was educating the child, for the youngster grew up and inflicted upon its own children all the horror that it had, itself, endured. It was heir to the brutality, heir to the Bible, heir to the strap, birch, rod, ferrule and hairbrush, so these were in daily use in all Christian homes. ¶ In my childhood, I remember a Baptist preacher who lived neighbor to us ❦ This man was loud, lacrimose, brutal, a devout Christian, and a preacher of power, snatching many souls from the burning. The way that gospel sharp used to pass out his tidings of great joy broke in on my childish fancies, so I became convinced that if God was really just, that pious, bawling beast who fed fat on our chickens would go to hell, sure. But I kept my suspicions to myself. This preacher had a strap cut from a side of sole-leather—a strap three feet long, with tails, with which he used to beat up one of his nine or ten children every day ❦ From the baby wearing diapers to a big boy of sixteen, and a girl full-grown, they all got it. I have heard their cries for mercy ring out on a winter’s night when they would run out into the yard to escape their pious parent intent on saving their souls. ¶ Once, one of his daughters, a girl of fifteen, spent ten cents for a blue ribbon, and appeared in church with the ribbon in her hair. Her father saw her from his place in the pulpit. He noted her mark of pride ❦ He denounced her before the congregation, and expressed a hypocritical, pious pain that his own flesh and blood should be guilty of such devilish frivolity. Then he ordered her out of the church. When he got home after the service, he fell upon her with the strap. It pained him, but he felt it was his duty to correct her. The mother was a sick and undone little creature, who twice had twins, and bore at least one baby a year, except the year when her lord and master crossed the plains and got alkalied. And this woman really believed, too, that the children should be punished, and so she had a way of reporting them, thus, “I’ll tell your father on you when he comes home!” She, too, believed in Solomon, and she believed also in her husband’s religion. Poor thing, she was too busy bearing babies to really think anything out for herself ❦ But that Sunday afternoon, when her husband felt it his duty to whip the daughter, the girl ran to the mother and demanded protection. The good man was laying on the strap, anywhere, over the girl’s head, shoulders, her arms and hands, although usually he picked out some choice portion of anatomy and did an artistic job. ¶ Yet this time the girl fought back, and she was only a slim slip of a thing. But now, the womanhood in her was aroused. She felt insulted. She struck, she bit, she scratched, she screamed. And then she ran to her mother ❦ Something in the little yellow mother was now aroused. Her child was being abused. Well, what of it! Hadn’t she seen these whippings going on daily for twenty years? But this was different ❦ The adolescent girl had only given way to her innocent and natural desire to put forth a little color and be beautiful. Now it was brute man against woman. The mother seized the strap. It was jerked through her clenched hands with such violence that it took the skin with it. The preacher had backed the girl into a corner, and with one hand clutching her hair was laying on the strap with the other, in the name of the Lord. The mother was behind. Suddenly she seized a long-handled skillet that was on the kitchen-stove, she swung it with both hands, and it landed square on the man’s head ❦ He was dazed, and turned half-around. Then he got another one. He was getting a kitchen shower. One sharp edge of the skillet skinned one of his ears and cut it half-off, as Peter touched up the servant of the High Priest. The blood ran in a stream. The woman seeing the gore, and amazed at her own temerity, fell in a dead swoon. The girl escaped and ran over to our house. My father and mother hurried over, and, kid-like, I followed. We found the preacher on his knees, praying over his wife, begging God for her recovery ❦ He told us he had stumbled and fallen against the cook-stove. My father took a stitch in the ecclesiastic souse, and washed off the blood of the lamb ❦ The woman soon recovered and was put to bed. The girl took care of herself. She told my mother the truth of the incident, but was cautioned not to repeat it to others, and she didn’t. ¶ The next Sunday the holy man preached as usual, unctuous and oily, smiling and smirking, thundering ponderously betimes, warning us to flee the wrath to come. ¶ This daughter died at eighteen, of galloping consumption. One of the boys achieved considerable local fame as a horse-thief. I believe he was the only one of that big family who reached maturity, and this was because he had a pachyderm hide and a heart of gneiss ❦ Several of the children died in babyhood, the rest ran the gamut of about all the diseases in the books. And finally, the Lord’s will was done. A long row of little white headstones in the village graveyard marks where they sleep, freed from the strap, awaiting a glorious resurrection at the Last Great Day. ¶ What killed them? The strap, I should say, carried to its logical limit, with a plentiful lack of love. Spare the rod and save the child, for love is life, and hate is death. Love is better than a cat-o’-nine-tails, and Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, was a lobster—at least part of the time.
